Look Sports 1980...

Early in the year, we had our national sales meeting at Park City. This was my very first time in what would become my real hometown. We stayed at the brand new Racquet Club Condos and couldn’t ski because there was no snow. Deschamps, Look’s marketing director came from France for the occasion, and I believe that Blime was on his way out.

Pike, our western sales manager, had brought us a motivational speaker he had used when at Xerox and we thought we were ready for big times! We had introduced our ski brake, to respond to Salomon’s as well as our new Look 37, a pretty homely looking binding.

When I returned home, we moved from our White Plains apartment into a single family home in nearby Hawthorne. At the 1980 Las Vegas ski show, a new guy showed up by the name of Kelly and was introduced to me as being the newly hired President, Look was looking for.

Coming from Thermos, Kelly was as clueless as the rest and focused first on getting a bright yellow Mazda RX7 as a company car and purchasing a large house in Chappaqua, NY. Later in May, my parents came to visit us from France and we had a good time together.

In the summer Kelly came on board as the new president and from the get go, did as badly as Ed Paul, his predecessor. Either the place was cursed, or Blime or Cattin were woefully incapable of hiring the right people.

Sales kept on struggling as Salomon products were advancing by leaps and bounds and the company was working on its ski boot project. Look, for its part, had decided to establish a factory in the US in order to build our new economy binding, the Look 27.

Simultaneously, Look was also approaching Nordica with a project of intergrated boot-binding system. All this made Kip Pitou, Beconta’s sales manager, say: “If you’d put a tent on top of Look Sports, you could sell tickets...” Nice way to compliment your tenant!

The good news concluding the year was our moving into a beautiful home we had just purchased in Chappaqua. Yeah, like just like Kelly!