Discover Romp Skis in Crested Butte
The power tools stop. In the sudden quiet of the Romp Skis factory, tucked into a low building on Belleview Avenue in Crested Butte, Colorado, you can hear the wind working through the Elk Mountains outside. The smell is wood and epoxy and something else – the particular scent of a place where things get made by hand, one at a time, without apology.
A ski core is set down, someone runs their palm along the wood grain. The production schedule moves at the pace of craftsmanship, not factory quotas. This is not a confession of inefficiency. It’s a statement of intent.
In an industry where efficiency is measured in thousands of units per day, where skis roll off assembly lines in China with the mechanical precision of automotive parts, Romp operates on a different frequency entirely. They are committed to the radical idea that making fewer things better might actually be more interesting than making more things faster.
The Arithmetic of Obsession
The numbers tell the story. The global ski equipment and gear market size was valued at USD 15.9 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 22.9 billion by 2030. Within this vast machinery of commerce, Romp occupies a space so small it barely registers on industry radar. They are the statistical noise, the rounding error, the thing that happens when you zoom in too close on the spreadsheet.
But here’s what the spreadsheets miss: while the big brands chase market share with carbon fiber wizardry and marketing budgets that could fund small nations, Romp has spent the last fourteen years perfecting the art of making skis for people who actually use them. Not posers, not gear collectors, not weekend warriors shopping for validation. People who disappear into the backcountry before dawn and emerge after dark, carrying stories the marketing departments couldn’t invent.
The company’s origin story reads like a case study in accidental entrepreneurship. Brothers Caleb and Morgan Weinberg arrived in Crested Butte in the 1990s, ostensibly to ski. In 1992, Caleb Weinberg moved to Crested Butte for its legendarily steep and deep ski terrain. His brother, Morgan, soon followed him west from New Hampshire. They built houses until the real estate market collapsed, then built skis because they had the tools and the time and the particular combination of boredom and curiosity that leads to interesting mistakes.
The Geography of Craft
Crested Butte is not accidentally beautiful. It sits at 8,885 feet, surrounded by peaks that top out over 14,000 feet, in a valley so perfectly configured for skiing that it feels like the mountains conspired to create it. The town exists because of mining, survives because of skiing, and thrives because of the particular culture that emerges when people choose difficult beauty over easy comfort.
P.S. We open at noon on deep powder days, reads the note on Romp’s business hours. This is not cute marketing. It’s a statement of priorities. When the snow falls, the work stops. When the work stops, the skis happen.
The factory itself occupies a space that would make efficiency experts weep. Every ski is made under the same roof, a hybrid office-storeroom-factory, just a few blocks off Crested Butte’s main drag. Here, the distance between conception and completion is measured in footsteps, not supply chains. The person who presses the laminate might be the same person who tests it on the mountain that afternoon.
This geography matters more than you might think. When your factory is surrounded by the terrain your product is designed to navigate, when your test laboratory is a chairlift ride away, when your customers are your neighbors, the feedback loop becomes immediate and unforgiving. You can’t hide behind marketing when your ski breaks on someone’s favorite run.
The Succession Problem
Most small businesses die with their founders. They are too personal, too dependent on the specific obsessions and capabilities of the people who started them. Romp solved this problem by accident, through the patient cultivation of someone who understood both the work and the why.
Chase Gardaphe started as a customer, became an employee, evolved into a manager, and finally, in 2024, became the owner. In 2024, long-time customer and skier Chase Gardaphe acquired the company, bringing expertise in sales, marketing, and operational experience. This was not a hostile takeover or a private equity extraction. It was succession planning disguised as natural evolution.
The transition says something important about the kind of business Romp has become. It’s not dependent on the charisma of its founders or the momentum of its early success. It’s dependent on the continued existence of people who care more about the work than the wealth it might generate.
The Technology of Restraint
Walk through any ski shop and you’ll encounter the vocabulary of modern ski construction: carbon fiber, titanal, rocker profiles, directional sidecuts. The language has become so technical, so dense with engineering jargon, that it obscures the fundamental question: does the ski work?
Romp’s approach to technology is marked by deliberate restraint. They use sustainable wood cores, experiment with vibration-damping materials like Countervail, and pay attention to the details that matter on the mountain rather than in the marketing brochure. Their most radical innovation might be their refusal to innovate beyond necessity.
Consider their satisfaction guarantee: ride the skis for ten days, and if you’re not happy, they’ll make it right. This is not the desperate gesture of a company unsure of its product. It’s the confident statement of builders who know their work.
The crash replacement policy tells a similar story. When your ski breaks in the backcountry, Romp doesn’t direct you to a warranty department or a customer service hotline. They replace it, because the alternative – a broken ski in the middle of nowhere – is unacceptable to people who understand what skis are actually for.
The Economics of Enough
A decade later, the only garage brands that survived had something the others lacked: the discipline to stay small on purpose. The ski industry is littered with the remains of boutique manufacturers who confused growth with success, who traded craftsmanship for market share, who discovered too late that scaling up meant scaling away from the very thing that made them special.
Romp has avoided this trap through the simple expedient of asking different questions. Instead of “How big can we get?” they ask “How good can we get?” Instead of “How many skis can we make?” they ask “How few skis do we need to make?” These might sound like the same questions, but they lead to entirely different businesses.
The result is a company that employs a handful of people, serves a customer base measured in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands, and generates revenue that would barely register on a corporate balance sheet. It’s also a company that has survived for fourteen years in an industry notorious for crushing small players, that commands fierce loyalty from its customers, and that continues to attract people who could work anywhere but choose to work here.
The Future of Small
The larger ski industry moves in predictable cycles. Consolidation, innovation, marketing, repeat. Brands are bought and sold, technologies are hyped and abandoned, and the fundamental question – what makes a good ski? – gets lost in the machinery of commerce.
Romp represents an alternative timeline, a what-if scenario where the industry developed differently. What if quality mattered more than quantity? What if customer relationships mattered more than market share? What if the people making the skis were the same people skiing them?
These questions matter because they point toward a different way of thinking about business, about craft, about the relationship between makers and users. In a world increasingly dominated by scale and efficiency, Romp’s insistence on staying small feels almost revolutionary.
The company’s plans for the future are characteristically modest. More reach, better retail presence, expanded demo networks. But no talk of offshoring, no gimmicky pivots, no desperate grabs for market share. Just the continued pursuit of the thing they’ve always been chasing: the perfect ski for the people who need it most.
The Discipline of Craft
There’s a moment when the larger questions fall away. The global market, the industry trends, the economics of small-batch manufacturing—none of it matters. What matters is the grain of the wood, the angle of the cut, the way the tools feel in practiced hands.
This is the secret that Romp has discovered and that the larger industry has forgotten: the work itself is the point. Not the growth, not the recognition, not the exit strategy. The work. The daily practice of making something useful, something beautiful, something that performs exactly as promised when the snow is deep and the mountain is steep and there’s no one around to witness anything but the turn itself.
In Crested Butte, surrounded by peaks that have witnessed a thousand ski companies come and go, Romp Skis continues the patient work of staying small on purpose. They build skis at the pace of craftsmanship, not factory quotas. And in a world obsessed with more, faster, bigger, this might be the most radical thing of all.
The bandsaw starts again. The work continues.
