The story of skiing is littered with brands that didn’t quite make it out of the slush.
In some instances, there were forays into snow sports from major companies like Nike or Spalding that didn’t pan out. In other moments, smaller, independent brands couldn’t quite get the traction they needed to succeed. Unforeseeable business challenges—or changing fashions—can topple once popular brands, too.
Just because they’re gone, though, doesn’t mean they’re forgotten. These are five skiing brands or sub-brands that no longer exist.
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It may seem strange, but not so long ago, the iconic Nike logo adorned the equipment of high-profile freeskiers like Sammy Carlson and Kaya Turski. Despite hopeful freeskiing forum posts and the leak of convincing-looking mock-ups of Nike ski boot prototypes, the company didn’t sell hard goods. Instead, Nike stuck with coats, jackets, and snowboard boots, many of which fell under the now-defunct Nike 6.0 sub-brand.
Nike’s previous involvement in skiing ended in 2014, but a snowsports resurgence seems to be taking place, this time under the Nike-owned Jordan label. In 2025, professional snowboarder Zeb Powell shared that he and Jordan had teamed up. He is the first snowboarder to earn a Jordan Brand sponsorship.
Does this mean that the dream of Nike ski boots might still be alive? Probably not. If you’re lucky, though, you might still be able to find a used pair of those old Full Tilts with puffy tongues that look like Jordans.
In the 1970s, Chris and Denny Hanson—a pioneering team of brothers from the Midwest—introduced the first commercially successful rear-entry ski boot. Their company, Hanson Ski Boots, was soon jostling with Lange for dominance in the North American ski equipment market.
As seen in the pages of POWDER in 1977, the product they sold had a sleek and futuristic look. According to that advertisement, the boots were also named “one of the 25 best-designed products” by Fortune. The POWDER advertisement also not-so-shyly pointed out that Hanson was the only ski boot manufacturer to make the list.
Hanson left a mark, and soon other major companies had their own rear-entry models. But the innovative brand wouldn’t last. In the early 1980s, high interest rates and low snowfall bucked the ski industry—including Hanson—prompting the sale of the company to Daiwa, a Japanese sports conglomerate. Daiwa continued selling Hanson boots abroad through the late 1990s.
Meanwhile, in 2024, the brothers Hanson were inducted into the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame.
The 1970s brainchild of famed hotdogger Bobbie Burns, The Ski stood out with unique color-blocked graphics. Formerly a designer for K2, Burns left the company to launch his own independent freestyle-focused brand that would go on to sell tens of thousands of skis.
The Ski’s products were meant, in part, for gracefully smashing down mogul fields. To this end, Burns made his sticks with a soft longitudinal flex so they would go over the bumps rather than through.
Legend says that Burns, during a drive to Ketchum, Idaho, was inspired by the fields of sagebrush he passed through in the creation of The Ski. So, for added mystique, the brand’s skis had a bit of sagebrush in their cores that could be seen through the clear base material.
While you can’t pick up a brand new pair from The Ski today, Scott did, in more recent years, sell a re-imagined version of the iconic sticks.
Baseballs, basketballs, and … skis? For a time, Spalding was a contender on the ski circuit with models like the Squadra Corse, as shown above. A New York Times article published in 1974 noted that skiing was the company’s “newest area of interest.” Of course, Spalding’s infatuation with skiing didn’t last forever—the company’s website doesn’t even mention the snowsports fling—but on internet forums, seasoned skiers still remember what once was.
Once the hottest new kid on the freeskiing block, Revision Skis faced an unceremonious and foggy downfall in the mid-2010s, as documented in an investigation published by Newschoolers eight years ago.
The company got off to a strong start, sponsoring members of the trailblazing European ski crew The Bunch, among other pros like Sandy Boville and Mike King. Revision also curried favor with park and street skiers by offering a warranty on its products that covered damage caused by rails or cement. In an interview with Freeskier, the company’s co-founder said that with Revision, he was aiming to sell to jib-inclined skiers aged between 18 and 34.
But then, according to Newschoolers, Revision stopped shipping skis, reporting that the Better Business Bureau had issued a scam warning associated with the company. In covering the news, Newschoolers attempted to contact Revision numerous times but didn’t receive a response.
At the time that Newschooler’s article was published, those who had ordered—but not received—skis from Revision were left largely in the dark.
Now, Revision’s legacy occasionally resurfaces on used gear marketplaces. Despite the controversy, they might be worth buying as the skis themselves, reportedly, were actually pretty fun. A steep discount never hurts.
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