The original Pre marketing strategy...

A few days ago, I found this ad for Pre skis, published in the Fall of 1991. The approach was spot on. That was just when it was transferred from Chuck Ferries' capable hand to those of Kip Pitou.

From the get go, the ski was created to serve a niche market, that of skiers who loved to ski and didn't want to ski, like the masses, on Rossignols or Atomics.

The distribution was for them most part clean and limited, and with the marketing monies Pitou was given, the brand could have survived nicely, if not thrived, especially in view of today's micro-segmented market.

This wasn't to be however, and by adopting an old-style and dysfunctional approach to distribution that had already failed for Kästle skis, the brand was doomed fairly quickly.

Twenty years ago, in May of 1994, when they realized it, K2's Rodstein, Petrick and Pitou agreed to pull the plug on Pre, but conveniently forgot to tell me about it; the rest is another lesson in the dire consequences of bad Karma...