Discover Shaggy’s Skis: Custom Handmade in Michigan
Shaggy Skis builds custom skis in Boyne City, Michigan, using Michigan ash and poplar cores, race-grade sintered bases, and four construction options. Buyers can customize flex profiles, rocker patterns, and topsheet graphics, then order directly from the workshop. Every ski is pressed, tuned, and finished on-site. No overseas factories, no distribution chains, just skis made for skiers.
The bandsaw kicks up a fine dust of Michigan ash when Jeff Thompson cuts cores at the Shaggy’s factory in Boyne City. Not mystery composite from a contractor in Guangdong. Real Michigan wood from Lumber, milled nearby. The sawdust settles on everything: the CNC machine, the pressing stations, Jeff’s safety glasses. By the end of a production day, the shop smells like a furniture maker’s basement, which is to say it smells like actual wood being worked by people who know what wood does when you heat it, bend it, and glue carbon fiber to it.
Most skis begin their lives in meetings about projected unit sales and retail price architecture. They’re designed in one country, manufactured in another, branded in a third, distributed through a fourth. By the time they reach a shop floor, they’ve been touched by supply chain managers, import specialists, and seasonal sales reps whose job is to move inventory before the next model year renders it obsolete. The skis work fine. But they contain no memory of place, no number you can call when the topsheet delaminates (like it did with my son’s skis last year) and reach the person who pressed it.
Shaggy’s Skis works differently, which is either admirable stubbornness or a business model with a lifespan, depending on who you ask.
Family Business in the Actual Sense
The company name traces back to Sulo “Shaggy” Lehto, who carved wooden skis in 1908 in Kearsarge, a small mining town in the Keweenaw Peninsula, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula thumb that juts into Lake Superior like an accusatory finger. Shaggy wasn’t thinking about heritage branding or artisanal marketing when he shaped those planks. His niece needed to get to school. The snow was deep. So he made skis.
A century later, his great-grand-nephew Jonathan Thompson and Jonathan’s brother Jeff were dissecting old Dynastar skis at a kitchen table near Detroit. It was 2005. They’d shaped a surfboard with their father. They’d built a ski bike that failed spectacularly. So they turned to skis themselves. Their first press lived in the basement, in a room where they’d ripped out the carpet.
They kept building.
By 2008, the prototypes had evolved into something people would pay for. They named the company after Uncle Shaggy and the Keweenaw’s copper mining history. Jonathan eventually moved to Colorado to work at a ski area and has since launched other ventures. Jeff earned a mechanical engineering degree from Michigan Tech, the mining school in Houghton, MI. He took what he learned about materials, stress analysis, and manufacturing processes and kept making skis. Now he does it with his parents, John and Shari. When you call Shaggy’s, you might get Shari. That’s not a staffing problem. That’s the org chart.
The business has a lean and fluctuating employee headcount depending on season. They produce somewhere in the neighborhood of one to two thousand pairs of skis per year. For context, a single major brand can produce ten times that in a month.
The Problem with Volume
Scale has its virtues. Economies of scale mean lower per-unit costs. Widespread distribution means accessibility. These are not trivial considerations. The global ski industry runs on these principles because they work.
But scale also erases specificity. When you’re producing twenty thousand pairs of a single model, you’re building for the aggregate skier, a statistical composite of survey data and focus group feedback. That skier doesn’t exist.
Shaggy’s operates at a scale where individual differences can’t be ignored because the individuals are right there, calling or emailing or walking into the showroom in Boyne City. Jeff Thompson has to look them in the eye. This changes the calculus.
Every Shaggy’s ski starts as rough lumber from a regional mill. The cores are either ash or poplar, or a combination, depending on the construction. They’re cut, indexed, and laminated to achieve consistent flex characteristics. The company offers four primary construction methods:
Standard: Ash core, triaxial fiberglass, unidirectional carbon fiber.
nanoMAG Damping System: Ash core with magnesium sheets inlaid to dissipate mechanical energy, triaxial fiberglass, unidirectional carbon fiber.
MidLight: Ash and poplar core, lightweight triaxial fiberglass, doubled unidirectional carbon.
Pure Carbon: Poplar core, ultralight biaxial carbon, unidirectional carbon.
From there, a buyer can specify camber and rocker profiles, adjust flex patterns, choose bindings, and design custom topsheet graphics. Want your dog on your skis? Fine. Want your kid’s crayon drawing? Also fine. Want to see the ash core through a clear topsheet? They’ll do that too.
The bases are sintered Durasurf 4001, the same race-grade UHMW polyethylene used by brands charging twice as much. The edges are 2.2 millimeters. The construction isn’t exotic. It’s just done on-site, by people who will tune your edges if you bring them back.
Prices hover around $800-$1,000, with custom builds exceeding $1500, which lands them below many high-end resort skis but above the sale-rack closeouts you’ll find in March at a big-box chain. For that price, you’re not getting cutting-edge marketing or sponsored athletes. You’re getting skis that were pressed in Boyne City by someone named Jeff.
The Michigan Context
The state’s ski history is longer than most people realize. Organized skiing in the Upper Peninsula dates to the 1880s, when Scandinavian immigrants brought the sport with them. The first Midwest chairlift opened at Boyne Mountain in 1948. Michigan has the second-most ski areas of any state.
Most Michigan skiing happens on modest vertical drops. Boyne Mountain, three miles from the Shaggy’s shop, offers 500 feet. These are not Chamonix statistics. But the Keweenaw Peninsula offers something different: Mount Bohemia, near Lac La Belle, which has the highest vertical drop in the Midwest at 900 feet and receives upward of 270 inches of lake-effect snow annually.
Bohemia doesn’t groom. It doesn’t make snow. It doesn’t cater to beginners. The resort website used to carry the tagline “No beginners allowed,” which is either honest marketing or lawsuit bait. The mountain features ungroomed glades, rock drops, cliff bands, and tree skiing that rivals anything in the East. When USA Today readers voted it the best ski resort in North America in 2023, people who’d never heard of Michigan started paying attention.
Shaggy’s Skis holds an annual “Family Vacation” at Bohemia: part demo event, part powder pilgrimage, part brand reunion. Customers show up with old Shaggy’s models, new customs, one-off prototypes. Jeff and his family ski with them, listen to what works and what doesn’t, and bring that feedback back to the shop. This isn’t market research. It’s just skiing with people.
The ski models carry Michigan names. The Ahmeek 105, the company’s bestseller, is named after a small Keweenaw town. Other models reference Brockway, Belle, Medora, Mohawk. The geography isn’t decorative. It’s literal. These are places in Michigan. The skis are designed for Michigan conditions: hardpack groomers, ice, shallow Midwest powder, spring slush. The fact that they also work in Colorado or Vermont is beside the point.
What Staying Small Costs
Direct-to-consumer sounds efficient until you realize it also means direct-to-customer-service, direct-to-warranty-claims, and direct-to-why-did-my-tracking-number-stop-updating. There’s no rep to blame. No distributor to absorb the complaint. When something goes wrong, Jeff answers the phone.
The model works if (and only if) the product is good enough that people tell their friends. The marketing is almost entirely word-of-mouth, demo days at Michigan resorts, and the occasional write-up in ski forums (like Radnut.com) where people debate whether a boutique builder in Boyne City can actually make a legitimate ski.
The answer, for what it’s worth, appears to be yes. Blister Gear Review, a publication known for obsessive testing and measured skepticism, found the Ahmeek 95 versatile and confidence-inspiring on hardpack. SkiTalk reviewers noted the Ahmeek 95 and Medora 95 performed well in Tahoe conditions. Small-scale manufacturing can produce skis that hold up against mass-market competition.
But small scale also means small margins. A bad season, a supply chain disruption, or a single large order that falls through can threaten the entire operation. During the pandemic, when the ski season ended abruptly in March 2020, Shaggy’s pivoted to producing anti-fog face shields for hospitals. They made shields before ramping ski production back up. This is not the behavior of a company with deep cash reserves. It’s the behavior of a company that has to stay nimble or disappear.
The Sustainability Asterisk
There’s no glossy carbon-neutral pledge on the Shaggy’s website. No corporate responsibility report. No partnership with a nonprofit that plants trees in exchange for logo placement.
What they have instead is proximity. The lumber travels thirteen miles. The bases are sourced domestically. The skis are built on-site, and offcuts are reused where possible. None of this will earn them a certification. But their supply chain can be drawn on a county map.
The question of whether small-scale manufacturing is inherently more sustainable than mass production is complicated. Per-unit energy costs might actually favor large factories with optimized processes. But small scale eliminates overproduction, dead inventory, and the waste that comes from building ten thousand pairs of a ski that only eight thousand people wanted. A ski that lasts longer because the person who made it will fix it matters too, though that’s hard to quantify in a lifecycle analysis.
In a market where greenwashing has become an art form (where brands slap “eco-friendly” on anything with recycled packaging) Shaggy’s seems less interested in making claims than in making skis. They still use epoxy. They still use plastics. There’s no utopia here. Just a smaller circle of consequences.
What This Actually Means
The economics of staying small are unforgiving. Growth means either raising prices, increasing volume, or accepting lower margins. Raising prices limits the customer base. Increasing volume requires more equipment, more space, more people, which erodes the direct relationship that justifies the model in the first place. Accepting lower margins works until it doesn’t.
Jeff Thompson appears to have made peace with this. Shaggy’s has been in business for two decades, which suggests they’ve found an equilibrium. They’re building skis for people who want skis built by someone they can call.
Whether this model survives another twenty years depends on variables no one controls: lumber costs, resin prices, the cost of machining, the availability of skilled labor, and whether enough people still care that their skis were made by someone named Jeff in a shop that smells like ash and epoxy.
It also depends on whether the skis keep working. Because in the end, no amount of craft mystique or heritage storytelling will save a ski that doesn’t hold an edge or delaminates after a season. The gear has to perform. The Ahmeek 105 has to rip on hardpack and float in powder. The Brockway 90 has to carve. The Medora 95 has to inspire confidence on ice and maneuverability in trees.
So far, it seems they do.
Shaggy’s Skis isn’t making a romantic argument about the virtues of small-scale manufacturing. They’re making skis. If you want them, you know where to find them. If you don’t, there are plenty of other options. The market will sort it out, as markets do.
But when the lake-effect snow machine kicks into gear and northern Michigan gets buried under another two feet of powder, Jeff Thompson might close the shop for a few hours. He’ll ride skis he made, with people he knows, on lake effect snow. That won’t show up in a quarterly earnings report. But it’s worth something.
