I Saw Inside The Ski Factory Where Salomon Made The New QST Line

This past December POWDER got invited to visit Salomon’s state-of-the-art Annecy Design Center (ADC), the iconic French ski brand’s global headquarters, design laboratory and prototyping facility. I got to spend a day touring the nearly 400,000 square-foot facility on the outskirts of Annecy, France, home to nearly 750 employees, and houses the design, marketing and sales teams for Salomon’s alpine skiing, nordic skiing, snowboarding, running, and streetwear (sportstyle) branches. The campus is impressive, showcasing the brands future-forward mentality, and it’s where the new 2025-2026 QST skis and boots were born.

Annecy lies at the foot of some of Europe’s largest mountains, a short drive from countless world-class ski areas including the Chamonix-Mont Blanc, Les Gets, and many more. It’s clear that everyone I meet who works here draws inspiration from these peaks, working and playing outside, often together, and bringing that enjoyment and experience to their designs.

This place is steeped in history, building on the heritage of the late Georges Salomon, who innovations included repurposing his father’s sawblade factory to create some of the first metal ski edges, producing the first releasable ski bindings, and bringing about radical changes in ski boot design, to name a few.

Building ski equipment en masse is a cyclical process, with designers learning from every version of skis, boots, or bindings they make. Of course, that’s the whole point of the ADC–letting designers and engineers quickly iterate on designs in-house, to produce equipment for the future without adding lengthy wait times to receive samples from faraway factories. The massive Annecy facility has everything you would need to create skis, boots, bindings, apparel, and footwear from raw materials. That includes ski and boot milling machines, ski presses, boot molds, finishing tools, World-Cup grade tuning tools, testing and quality control equipment and an entire factory floor for producing apparel, footwear and boot liners.

Walking through the facility, I glean some insight into what the process of creating skis like the brand new QST Blank entails. Jon Bertoni, Salomon’s Alpine Marketing Manager takes us directly onto the factory floor, showing off the entire production line from core selection, through assembly, pressing, curing, and applying a final tune. We walk up to a massive wall where all the ski cores are laid out, and Bertoni explains the difference between ash, poplar, paulownia, and other woods and how they affect ski performance. He pulls a milled length of poplar from the rack, explaining that it will soon be pressed into a QST ski and showcases the flex properties.

Across the floor, a ski builder is just pulling a fresh ski out of a massive ski press. It’s a pair of World Cup GS skis–Salomon produces every ski, binding, and boot for the World Cup alpine and nordic ski racing athletes at the ADC. Commercial skis like the QST line are designed here, but built at Atomic’s (Salomon’s sister brand) much larger and more efficient factory in Austria, and most of their boots and bindings are manufactured in various owned facilities elsewhere in Europe.

The attention to detail in the skis that come out the press is remarkable. The build pops the pair out of the CNC-machined mold, carefully inspects it, and moves them over to a curing rack before they get hand finished and tuned by some of the best ski techs on the planet. Some lucky racer on the Salomon World Cup team is going to be going ridiculously fast on these very soon.

Around the corner, we get a glimpse into the boot prototyping facility, where two massive machines make the magic happen. First, a CNC milling machine creates boot molds from enormous blocks of raw aluminum. Bertoni shares that creating these molds is one of the single most expensive things a ski boot manufacturer can do–creating molds for a full size run of ski boots costs upwards of $1 Million. Designing these lasts is done on a computer before the design is sent to the CNC mill. The computer-controlled machine creates two sides of the mold, plus an insert, where a small void gets filled with boot plastic.

These pieces get loaded into the enormous injection molding machine, where the molten plastic gets pumped into that gap at specific pressures to create your boot shells. Boot flex is largely determined by the pressure the plastic gets injected at–Bertoni picks up a pair of blue race boots meant for World Cup champion Marco Odermatt and points out that the pressure these get injected at would render them at roughly a 400 flex. Think you’d have the legs for that?

The next piece to the puzzle is housed in a small cramped room, where a team of engineers builds and tests ski bindings. It feels like a science lab here, with all sorts of measurement tools, assembly devices, and testing machines lining the walls and tables. A few years ago, this is where Cody Townsend and a few other Salomon athletes first developed the Shift binding that revolutionized freeride ski touring, and it’s where the current Strive, MTN, and alpine racing bindings are being developed. The room here is a small-scale version of Salomon’s larger binding factory, and I learn how every single unit produced is calibrated to the international DIN release standard during assembly to ensure safety.

Finally, we enter the testing room, where huge metal cages surround a variety of testing machines–these are meant to destroy skis, boots, and bindings and measure what kinds of forces are required to break each product. Bertoni and a technician walk us through testing a Strive binding to various international standards. A dummy ski mounted with the test binding gets loaded into the machine and hooked up to a boot insert attached to a long lever with a force sensor. With a loud bang, the boot snaps out of the binding and the ski falls to the floor–the resulting force reading is in the green, meaning the binding has passed the test.

On our way back to the lobby, walking through racks of freshly-pressed race skis, bins of boots and binding parts and huge stacks of raw material, it’s fascinating to think about what’s next for Salomon. Other than a few displays around the marketing offices upstairs, there isn’t much in terms of celebrating the past. 

Not that the brand isn’t proud of their storied history, but it’s clear the vision still holds true to what Georges Salomon set out to do years ago. In fact, he’s often quoted as saying, “We must always forge ahead. What fascinates me is what I am going to do tomorrow,” and that legacy sure lives on.