ASPEN — A tray of donuts appears. A meat-and-cheese tray follows. A dozen skiers are booting up in the Strafe showroom, surrounded by colorful new jackets and pants. A laptop screening of a ski video draws a gaggle. It’s a circus of skiers.
“It’s like this every day. Classic Strafe,” says one of the tribe members, a former All-American ski racer named Sam Coffey.
The Aspen-based outerwear company Strafe was born six years ago by a pair of University of Colorado grads who really only wanted to ski. Today, twins Pete and John Gaston, 30, are captaining a thriving international brand. They still ski every day, only now it’s all about product testing in Highlands Bowl, the 250-acre high-alpine jewel of Colorado steep skiing.
“All we were interested in back in the early days was skiing fast in diverse terrain and becoming the best all-round skiers we could be,” John said. “Highlands was our place. It has been the most important thing to our brand.”
Those early days were in the mid-2000s, when the Gastons were atypical students at CU. In four years, they never spent a winter weekend in Boulder. Every Thursday they hauled up to Aspen, returning to classes early Monday. All weekend, they hiked and skied Highlands Bowl.
“We got obsessed with hiking the bowl and it really exposed some serious flaws in the gear we had. When storms roll in up there, it can hit 70 mph winds. It’s nuts and you need a lot of protection but you are also working your butt off on the climb,” John said.
The crew would bang out a few sweaty laps of the bowl and then some resort laps. They’d be soaked and frozen.
“For a while we didn’t realize there was another option,” John said.
Then, as seniors, they went to Europe for a spring break ski holiday. They saw jackets made by European outfits like Norrona and Sweet Protection — options. John, laid up the next winter with a broken back, hatched a plan to design ski wear that looked and functioned better than what he was used to wearing and appealed to a younger audience at an affordable price point. The test gear — 57 jackets, 57 pants and 28 of the company’s signature one-piece suits — hit shelves in 2010.
There wasn’t a business plan. John and Pete weren’t trained designers or engineers. But they lived to ski and had Highlands in their backyard. The bowl, they say, taught them.
“Highlands Bowl is an authentic testing ground. Within a lunch break, you can bump through entirely different climates and different geography. You don’t need to leave at dawn to get up there either,” John said.
John won his first Highlands Inferno in Strafe’s one-piece Sickbird Suit, named after the freeskiing contest award for the gnarliest line, an award John won in 2007 in a Snowmass competition. Today, the Sickbird and one jacket design have blossomed into more than a dozen lines, each with a specific purpose like freeskiing or ski mountaineering racing.
Five years ago the brothers forged a deal with Polartec to layer the company’s stretchable, breathable yet water-shedding Neoshell membranes and insulation inside their jackets and pants.
The company’s latest designs include roomy, durable freeride jackets, snugger, more breathable softshell alpine fits, and extremely breathable active suits for mountaineering. Strafe provided the amply vented jackets and race suits to the 25-athlete U.S. Ski Mountaineering Team on its recent record-setting trip to the Pierra Menta Ski Mountaineering World Championships.
The striking race kits — resembling a Captain America suit — were wildly popular with both the athletes and spectators at the race, which is considered the Tour de France of ski mountaineering.
“They were super noticeable. But from a technical standpoint, there were days when we were standing in rain and days when it was sunny and bright, and their pants and jackets worked well in all conditions,” said Ram Mikulas, the president of the U.S. Ski Mountaineering Association.
The evolution from baggy and breathable ski jackets to lightweight yet waterproof racing shells reflects the growth of Pete and John as skiers. John is the fastest American ski mountaineering racer. His recent 13th-place finish in the World Championships is the best ever for an American.
“As a brand we have grown our product in line with how we have grown, not just as skiers but as mountain people,” Pete said. “We moved here as young freeskiers and then we got more into touring and ski mountaineering and our product line reflects that growth.”
When John and Pete first tried uphill, they scoffed. John called the lightweight boots “fruit boots.” They started looking at the European racers, like the superhuman Spaniard Kilian Jornet, considered the best ski mountaineering racer of all time.
“I was hooked. Suddenly it became about how many Highlands laps we could get in a day,” said John, who holds the Highlands Bowl record at a baffling 11 laps.
Strafe has averaged 75 to 100 percent growth every year, growing from three employees to nine and expanding into two offices in Aspen Highlands village, a sort of office country club for skiers, day traders, lawyers and entrepreneurs.
It’s not cheap doing business there, but Strafe “is absolutely committed to Aspen,” Pete said.
“We are lucky we started Strafe in Aspen,” he said. “From our inception we were very well received within the community. Aspen is a leader in the ski industry. If we started Strafe in Crested Butte — and I love Crested Butte to death — we would not be the same company.”
SnowSports Industries America, the trade group that hosts the annual SIA Snow Show in Denver and develops deep retail research into wintersports sales, showed 4.6 million skiers in 2015-16 said they participate in freeskiing, not alpine skiing. SIA also shows backcountry equipment, including boots with a walk mode for uphill travel and avalanche safety tools, is one of the fastest-growing segments in ski retail. And outerwear, according to SIA, grew 9 percent in 2015 to reach $1.8 billion in sales. So Strafe is certainly following the growth curve in skiing.
“But we are not just trying to follow the trend,” says Whit Boucher, Strafe’s first employee, who skins up the hill with his dog before work every morning. “This is what we do every day.”