By Skiers, For Skiers - An Inside Look at 4FRNT Skis

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Within a few weeks of moving to Oregon this spring, I discovered that some friends I’d met at a ski test the year prior would be skiing Mt. Bachelor that week and we made plans to meet up. It was one of those ‘we’re lapping this lift and we’ll just find each other!’ plans that proved to be a simple one when from the lift I spotted four people ripping down the hill after one another at double the speed of pretty much anyone else out there. It happened that these friends I’d planned to meet were employees of Vermont based ski brand, 4FRNT and were in the final stages of prototyping a new ski.

I spent the rest of the day following brand manager Sam Kimmerle, marketing manager Nick Africano, team skier, Mallory Duncan, and the brand’s art director Harrison Johnson around as the snow became stickier and stickier in the May sun. Between laps, they swapped their skis around and chatted on the lifts about the difference between each pair. By the time snow was too hot to ski, they’d decided between the four of them which pair they unanimously liked the best and we toasted cold Modelos over it in the lot.

The prototyping process I witnessed was a microcosm for many of the brand’s core values. Their slogan ‘By Skiers, For Skiers’ seems like an obvious one for really any ski brand. After all, don’t most folks in the ski industry like to ski? But what sets 4FRNT apart from other brands, large and small, is things like what I had just witnessed: the end of the prototyping process where the skis hadn’t just been tested by the five 4FRNT employees, but by athletes, their friends, employees at demo shops, and other folks in all walks of the ski industry. They’d taken input from each and every one of those people to make a ski that spoke not just to the athlete whose name is on the collection, but to anyone who truly loves skiing. But how did this tiny, mighty brand grow into one that boasts some of the most legendary skiers on its team and has developed a cult following behind its skis?

In 2002, names like Seth Morrison, Shane McConkey, Eric Pollard, and Candide Thovex were synonymous with the blossoming freeskiing movement. But at the time, ski technology hadn’t quite caught up with the style of skiing that these folks were pioneering. Frustrated with continuously modifying his gear, midwest-born skier Matt Sterbenz, and his friends started constructing their own twin-tipped ski models. That year, Sterbenz created the first ski that would wield the 4FRNT name: the Matt Sterbenz Pro, better known as the MSP.

A couple of years later, Sterbenz met the legendary Eric Hjorleifson while skiing in Whistler. Hjorleifson, better known just as Hoji, has a reputation for being a dedicated garage-engineer and constantly modifying and innovating to improve his gear. Their meeting came at the perfect time and Hoji quickly applied his engineering skills to help Sterbenz grow the brand’s product line. His first pro model, the EHP, started 4FRNT down the path of rockered skis, which were a unique design at the time.The EHP eventually turned into the ski now known as the Renegade , a 122mm underfoot backcountry pow-slaying monster. “Eric's story with the brand is pretty on point for the evolution of 4FRNT in general. He’s kind of encapsulated that whole transformation of 4FRNT into what was in the mid 2000s pretty much a purely freestyle into powder brand as well,” said Kimmerle of Hoji’s presence. Sterbenz stepped down from the brand in 2017 and has carried his innovative approach to ski design into a new venture at WNDR Alpine.

Aside from Sterbenz himself, Hoji’s roots with 4FRNT may run the deepest of anyone. But he isn’t the only professional skier that’s been deeply involved with the brand. Utah-based Thayne Rich has also been a key player in some of 4FRNT’s ski designs. Rich worked in The White Room, 4FRNT’s rapid production facility based in Salt Lake (before the brand moved to Vermont) building skis alongside Hoji and Sterbenz. On his own time, Rich modified the Renegade and developed what would become his signature ski, the InThayne . “He built it, pressed it, skied it, realized that it was pretty awesome and, and showed it to everybody. It ended up being another really unique ski that you don't see super often. Rockered, full twin tip 117 mm underfoot that caters to a freestyle minded powder skier,” said Kimmerle of the InThayne.

Although 4FRNT and the industry at large have stepped away from them a bit in more recent years, these pro-model skis like the entire Hoji Collection and the InThayne are very foundational to the brand. But what a skier like Hoji or Rich, or Norwegian skier Stinius Skjøtskift, who is currently working on a pro model with the brand, might want to ski every day isn’t necessarily the same as the average customer. As they continue to grow their line of skis and refine existing designs, 4FRNT has also worked to make their skis appeal towards more intermediate skiers in an effort to widen their audience. Cambered skis like the MSP 91 and the Switch have joined the line up as options that serve a wider range of skier abilities but still embody some of the more niche design elements 4FRNT is known for.

The ability to have both a customer and athlete-forward approach to ski design is just one of the ways 4FRNT has benefitted from being an independent brand. Their community mindset also extends to things like partnerships and ski graphics. “It all comes to be because of people I meet or people I spend time with out on the hill. They're not random partnerships, it's because there's a connection outside of just the brand work,” said Kimmerle who spends much of his winters traveling for things like ski tests and team shoots and meeting lots of different people along the way.

Some of these partnerships include Pomoca, who they’ve worked with on skins for the 4-LOCK system, and Skida, another Vermont-based brand who have collaborated with 4FRNT on soft goods. The brand’s in-house art director and graphic designer Harrison Johnson also works with different artists to design a unique topsheet for every ski in their lineup. Johnson himself designed the detailed, colorful, and almost dystopian topsheet for the 2023/24 InThayne.

There are many things that make 4FRNT unique in today’s space of brand conglomerates and help them to stand out in a saturated market. They’ve got athletes like Hoji and Sjkøtskift in major productions as well as Mallory Duncan making award-winning pieces of independent ski media . But 4FRNT’s special sauce goes beyond who they sponsor or how rad they’re getting. If anything, the day I spent in Bend with the 4FRNT team is a testament to how much community matters to the brand and that they use their skis as a tool to build that.