Out of Look Sports, 1982 (continued)…

When 1982 began, my wife was expecting a baby for March or April. Look had left New York and was settling into its new Essex-Junction home, up in Vermont, within a brand-new Nordica distribution facility. The successful Italian boot company had just left RNC, a company jointly owned by Rossignol and Nordica to be on its own. My job was to work the marketing and sales transition for the first four months of 1982.

I was commuting every week from my home in New York, all the way to Vermont and staying at the South Burlington Ramada Inn. I was working with Rief, then Nordica’s marketing manager and with its sales managers, Petrich in the East, and Brammer in the West. The latter was a nice fellow from Provo, Utah, while Rief was more temperamental and difficult to work with. Petrich war harder to read and not necessarily welcoming.

Immediately, I began to look for a job and had a pretty positive interview with Volvo, in New Jersey, that was then also distributing Koflach boots. The job definition wasn’t quite clear and the money not so good, so I decided to seat on it.

A few weeks later, when I flew to the international Ispo trade show in Munich in late February, I happened to be in the same flight as Lumet, the new president of Lange USA. He invited me to the section of the plane where he was sitting with DeLotto, his CFO.

They asked what I was up to and offered me a job on the spot. They were looking for a director of marketing to support their sales efforts under the direction of Colley. We talked over salary, benefits and other details, and I agreed to start on June 1, after spending a quiet month with my family.

Going to work with a direct competitor wasn’t necessarily the liking of Garland, the new Nordica president, but every one ended up putting a good face to it. At the Las Vegas show, we had a press conference to show off our new Integral boot-binding system and Garland was not to happy to have me there.

What’s notable is that the Frenchman Thierry Convert who had replaced me in Nevers, accepted to take the spot I had vacated in Essex Junction! A few weeks later, our daughter Charlotte was born on a snowy April day, and after a few more weeks of presence in Burlington, I pocketed my end of contract bonus, got a big, nice trophy from Nordica, and said “adieu” to Look.

A bittersweet farewell, because while I had learned a lot at this “University of Hard Knocks” it had been done at a huge and lasting personal cost.