ART1FACT LABS x Shaggy's Skis
In 1908, Sulo "Shaggy" Lehto hand-carved a pair of wooden skis in Kearsarge, Michigan. Copper country. Deep snow country. He made them for his niece, who wore them through deep snow and down the slag hills from the mines. That pair passed through generations.
Jeff and Jonathon Thompson found them while cleaning out their grandmother's belongings. Then they built a company around them. Jeff and Jonathon spent four years building, testing, and refining before they sold a single pair. When they finally brought Shaggy's to the public in 2008, they'd invented something the ski industry wasn't making — a ski with race-level performance engineered for all types of powder. Great Lakes snow. Refrozen groomers. West coast, East coast, and everything in between. They didn't follow the market. They invented their own game.
“Every time we have pulled back and focused on serving our customers, we have grown from the inside out.”
Shaggy's does one thing. Skis. They’re one of the only brands in America that not only builds skis domestically, but truly makes them from scratch in-house. Every core milled from local ash and beech, sourced down the road, pressed and finished under one roof in Boyne City. No retailers. No outsourcing. When the ski industry moved toward lighter, cheaper, more disposable, they went the other way. Not as a positioning move. Because they believed it. Shaggy's behaves its beliefs.
Pick up a pair and you're holding a hundred and seventeen years of the same family doing the same thing in the same place. The wood comes from the same forests Sulo knew. The craft stays in the same hands. In a world of manufactured authenticity, real distinction comes from brands with rich heritage that continually refuse to compromise craft for scale.
Four our inaugural collaboration, our canvas was the Mohawk 98—Shaggy's all-mountain directional, named for a copper mine in the Keweenaw, built to carve on hard snow and float through powder—in black, white, and beech. Our new design language across the topsheet, and at the top, our Pegasus. The symbol of inspired creation, on a ski built by people who have been creating the same thing, the same way, for over a century. Inscribed below, a phrase that’s as true to us as it is to them: Aspiration Moves the World.
