333 Skis

Sustainable Manufacturing

Manufacturing based on nature’s sustainable process offers a competitive advantage in world markets.  

For nearly three years our factory has been at the end of a dirt road, on a hilltop, buried under six feet of snow, in the middle of a cow pasture.  Witness to an outpouring of insects, fish, birds, trees, snow crystals, we study how nature produces/manufactures without waste.   

Solar energy, atmospheric pressure, feedback loops, a near perfect recycling program and four building blocks; carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, nature manufactures all life forms and a range of organic molecules.

Our approach to manufacturing runs parallel: using solar power, atmospheric pressure, feedback loops, and five building blocks; base material, edge stock, fiber reinforcement, epoxy resin and core stock, 333 manufactures nearly any conceivable ski design.  

Nature manufactures locally; a deer is born in the forest, a larva matures in a stream, a tree grows from the soil (they are not then shipped from china to another forest). This level of supply chain management, having the raw materials available for assembly on time, is pretty darn cool.  Rather than warehouse material, increasing manufacturing costs, 90 percent of our stock is brought online within 3 business days prior to a production run. 

Nature produces a whole buffalo not in a huge factory but in the compact space of a womb.  This level of efficiency driven by a pervasive energy source, the sun, is brilliant.  Capturing solar energy and converting it into electrical currents that drive our hand tools, thus liberating our factory from the grid seemed like a cool idea.  We like manufacturing with a view, and what a view.

Feedback loops drive innovation in nature. When a species cannot sustain itself within the environment, nature’s inherent process of creating many “slight variations on the design” of that species continues.