Miller ‘100% committed’ to disrupting stagnant industry; still working to pay overdue wages
By Jack Reaney SENIOR EDITOR
Editor’s note: Explore Big Sky’s publisher, Outlaw Partners, previously held a marketing partnership with Peak Skis until 2024.
Bode Miller is determined to upend the ski manufacturing industry. On that quest, he’s had to put out a couple fires.
His latest venture, Peak Skis, began with an exciting, award-winning launch for winter 2022-23, but the brand fell upon hard times after about two years. Stories by the Colorado Sun and various ski-focused publications reported on a “collapse,” including employees and athlete-ambassadors like Michelle Parker and Chris Davenport going unpaid, a website going dark with no announcement, and the apparent failure of Peak’s unique direct-to-consumer model.
Miller, the brand’s co-founder, argues those reports were not entirely factual, and that the brand never died, despite recent announcements and fresh energy backed by support from new partners: businessman David Whitlock, and former Olympian and ski industry exec David Currier.
When Miller posted on social media in January 2026 announcing, “2026 Peak Skis are LIVE,” many skiers and media deemed it a resurrection following a quiet 2024-25 when Peak offered a very limited product line and its website went dark. In a separate post the next day, he wrote, “Thank you again for your support and I am personally looking forward to Peak 2.0.”
In a January email to investors and customers, Miller took accountability for “serious mistakes” that lost the trust of many supporters. “I owe you complete honesty, and I owe you an apology,” he wrote.
He added Peak’s commitment to rebuilding in a sustainable way: “Peak is back—more focused, more disciplined, and more committed than ever to doing things right.”
In a separate email days later, Miller thanked supporters for patience, honesty and support. “If you’re willing to give Peak another shot, I promise we’ll meet you with better execution, better communication, and the same obsession with performance that started this whole thing,” he wrote.
Many, including those owed money, have expressed skepticism with the brand’s current positioning.
“I don’t know if people followed my race career and everything else, but I’m not a quitter… I think we did a lot of really great stuff and accomplished a lot, and then had some difficulties. Some struggles and some setbacks.”
Bode Miller, hall-of-fame skier and founder of Peak Skis
From the start, Miller and co-founder Andy Wirth believed Peak’s innovative approach to ski manufacturing brought the “secret sauce” that would overcome difficult economics, paired alongside their direct-to-consumer model. It required a heavy payroll and a heavy burn rate, Miller explained, and certain decisions—like a “super cool” showroom in Bozeman’s Four Corners—were expensive and didn’t generate revenue.
They sought to be contrarians in the industry. Miller likened their approach to his all-or-nothing race style—sometimes it won him races, other times he crashed hard. But even with Peak going the way of the latter, Miller is confident in giving it another go.
On March 19, Miller spoke on the phone with Explore Big Sky to discuss his perspective on how Peak lost its way, and how he’s working to rebuild and reconcile.
Explore Big Sky: Let’s start with the recent news: What’s the current plan for Peak Skis?
Bode Miller: Well, the current plan is the same as the original plan. It’s just a scaling back of the ski division…. There’s nothing new. I mean, “Peak 2.0” was just a thing that caught on somehow. There’s nothing different—all the investors are the same, everybody who invested is still there in whole. And we still have skis. The website went dark because, basically, we had to let everybody go.
… We moved down to Park City, because that’s where I’ve been living and it’s just closer. We only have a limited [quantity] and models of skis. But we’re just going forward with that. The idea now is just to focus on the part that was the most critical from the beginning—I got sidetracked into building skis, because I like building good skis, and I like seeing people ski on skis that I build. And unfortunately… we sunk all of our money and all of our effort and time into that side of the business, and weren’t able to advance on the manufacturing side. So now I’m pretty singularly focused on the manufacturing, although I’m still being distracted by selling and fulfilling orders for skis now.
It’s at least at a healthy place, where the majority of my energy and time is going to this manufacturing solution. Ultimately once that’s done, it changes the whole model for not just Peak, but for ski companies all around. Because the whole business model was never to just build Peak Skis. It was to create a manufacturing solution so that we would build skis for everybody else with our technology—whether that was us doing white label for everybody in the beginning and then ultimately, licensing or selling the technology to lots of different companies so that they can build skis that way.
EBS: Cool. Ok, so you mentioned “no Peak 2.0.” I saw there was an announcement maybe two months ago, from you, about Peak Skis kind of being back. Can you just clarify, what did that mean?
BM: Well, I think the general perception was mostly media-driven, which just didn’t have any information… I was in the midst of sort of managing the situation of letting employees go, getting out of our [Bozeman] headquarters, so I didn’t put much energy into managing the narrative or the story.
And the people who did, like [Chris] Davenport, really seeded one story where he was owed $50,000 of bonuses that he wasn’t paid. So, he kind of drove that [Colorado Sun story] and that kind of became the narrative. And it just was—no part of it was factually correct, really, but as you can imagine I’ve been around media enough to know… at that time I had enough important things to work on that I didn’t really spend any energy on it.
So yeah, Peak 2.0 but nothing different, right? … A couple of guys, Dave Currier and Dave Whitlock stepped up and said, ‘Hey, we’ll help you to sort of soft-land this thing into what it should be’… The perception was that it was something different or investors had gone away and now we’re restarting it. None of that is true at all, it’s just the same thing.
All of our organizational structures, all the investments, all the cap table, all of our liabilities are still there. We’re just managing those and paying them down to the best of our ability. We paid a bunch of athletes and a bunch of our employees that had back-wages. We paid them, like, 35% of what they’re owed and we’re working through that list. But at the same time, I’m primarily focused on the manufacturing solution, ‘cause that’s where ultimately things actually work, and the company becomes what it should be.
And I’m still 100% committed to that, and I’ll get it done. But it was just a lack of information… it’s a small industry in a lot of ways, and once rumors kind of start, they just kind of go. No one really cares if they’re true or not, they just kind of repeat, and go.
… I’ve never said the company was done, I’ve never packed up shop. We had to make adjustments because we just didn’t have any more money and the system we were using was not sustainable. We were losing money, year-over-year, even though our skis were basically selling out. We became a perfect case study of why we need a manufacturing change in the business.
EBS: Thanks for discussing that. So, at this point, who is still involved in the business? Are there any athletes or ambassadors, and is Andy Wirth still involved?
BM: So, we let everybody go. We have no paid employees, we have a warehouse that obviously costs us a little bit of money to store skis in down here [in Utah] but it’s nothing like the old HQ up in Four Corners [Bozeman].
Andy stepped away from the company—still a great friend. There was nothing malicious about anything that he did. He put his ass into this thing. Very few people have a work ethic like he does. He’s the third or fourth biggest investor of cash dollars into the company… anyone saying, like, he made off with investor money, the opposite is true. He borrowed my car because he sold his truck and put that money into Peak.
So, the structure now is me. Running all parts, making all decisions, and David Whitlock and David Currier are helping with kind of restructuring, and helping with all the logistics. They’ve been great. They’ve been in the warehouse here. They pack and fulfill orders. You know, kind of re-set-up the website just to facilitate getting skis out to people. They’re not paid employees, they got a small compensation package of, kind of, options, and that’s it.
So, it’s now, what I would consider to be sustainable to get us through this period [so] I can finish the manufacturing solution.
EBS: Can you tell me just a bit more about what you mean by the manufacturing solution?
BM: Yeah, I mean a lot of it is being protected now [as intellectual property] and that’s kind of an ongoing process so I don’t want to get too detailed.
But essentially, ski manufacturing hasn’t changed since Howard Head build the first laminate skis in the late 50s, early 60s… It takes a really long time, it’s really messy, it’s really inconsistent, there’s a ton of variables in there. It’s expensive and it’s labor-intensive. So, for a long time, I’ve known there was a better way to do it.
… Basically, it’s a way to build skis is a new way across the board which will make them way more consistent, [with better] performance and ability to use more, kind of, modern materials… Mold costs, efficiency, labor, recyclability—everything is basically different and much, much better across the board. We’re talking orders of magnitude better.
So, being able to build skis in somewhere between under a second per pair, to a few seconds per pair. No mold cost, and [being] able to change prototypes, and dictate all the different characteristics: force vectors and flex, and torsion, weight and all that baked into the same automated process.
So, something that I feel like will be a real legacy move in the space, right? We haven’t changed in 60 years. Just logically, if something hasn’t changed in 60 years and it’s a global standard industry, then there’s probably an opportunity there. And that’s what I believe I’m solving for, and I believe it will be a massive, massive shift for the industry, all the way to the top… Just to make skis way better, way safer, way more fun.
EBS: Fascinating. Alright, just a couple more for you. As you move forward, what do you expect the Peak product line to be? Do you still plan to have the same array of widths and lengths, or are you simplifying?
BM: Economically, it made no sense. If you’re going to do that, you’re going to lose money, year over year, unless you get above, call it, 10-to-12-thousand pairs of skis. You can run super-duper lean and do OK below that, but in this case it just didn’t make any sense.
So we have 88 [millimeters] and 98s, which are both the new models of those skis, and we’ll sell those the end of this [ski season], over the summer and into next year—we’re not ordering new skis.
So we have all the sizes of the 88 and 98, and the 88 is the new geometry—the first of the geometry that I built—the other [88] was an open mold from Elan.
So, it will be very limited from within the Peak brand. And as we spool up the manufacturing, then we’ll expand to a full line.
EBS: And when you say ‘full line,’ does that include 104s, 110s?
BM: Yeah, and also wider. You know, I built a 118 with Crosson [a company that merged with Peak] that I loved, that I would love to build. And it just becomes way more cost effective—right now, there’s no way to do that really without just losing a bunch of money.
So yeah, it will be a full line. We’ll expand—we’ll build race skis. I’ve always wanted to build race skis that were sort of, call it ‘American-made’ that were exclusive to American and Canadian racers. Europeans have had a dominant position in that space for a long time… we’ll build really good kids skis.
It will be kind of a much more comprehensive line than what we had before, because it will be economically sound.
EBS: So, many of your early adopters live in Big Sky and Bozeman, and that’s the same with many of our readers. Do you have any additional thoughts you want to share, especially with these, kind of, ‘day-one’ supporters that are skiing at Bridger Bowl and Big Sky?
BM: I mean, obviously that was the whole point of it. To build good skis for people who live that lifestyle and care about what they’re skiing on, and want to have fun. And I appreciate people supporting the company, and I hope they’re happy with the product.
I think there hasn’t really been any knocks against [the skis]. I think the product spoke for itself and was really strong. I think we offered it at a very competitive price.
So in that sense, just to clarify that nothing has changed: I don’t quit easy. I mean, I don’t know if people followed my race career and everything else, but I’m not a quitter. And I wouldn’t have started this if I didn’t anticipate that things could go, you know, really well or really tough… I think we did a lot of really great stuff and accomplished a lot, and then had some difficulties. Some struggles and some setbacks.
But ultimately, I know that the solution that I’m coming up with will be really important for the industry as a whole, as well as for all my investors and supporters. So I’m committed to seeing that through and getting it done. And yeah, that’s it, really.
EBS: Well, thank you for your time Bode, and good luck with things moving forward.
