Gear Profile: Romp Skis in Crested Butte, Colorado
Originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of Spoke+Blossom
When brothers Caleb and Morgan Weinberg built a pair of skis in Morgan’s garage in 2009, they weren’t planning on starting a business. Both lifelong skiers from northern New Hampshire with a background in the construction industry, they originally made eight pairs of skis with the construction tools they already owned.
Photos by Trent Bona.
“We were just building skis for fun,” shares Caleb at their shop in Crested Butte this past September. “Everyone who we gave a pair to try loved them, and we got such good feedback that we decided to go for it and start a business.”
They wanted the name of their new business to be a single syllable — one that would resonate with their relationship to skiing.
“We wanted it to kind of describe who we were a little bit, and we did a lot of brainstorming, a lot of pages of words written down, and we found a definition for ‘romp’ that said ‘to play boisterously,’” Caleb explains. “We kinda liked that, so that’s what we went with.”
Now celebrating their 10th winter as Romp Skis, the Weinberg brothers specialize in creating custom skis, designed to perform in the exact way needed by the user and to maximize his or her skills.
Romp makes up to about five skis per day, about 400 skis per year, and sells directly to consumers. The process starts with a phone call (or even better, an in-person meeting in Crested Butte) with Caleb, where the customization process begins.
“We have all these different shapes, meaning the outline of the ski, and different lengths, so we do an interview with you about your skiing, talk about what you’re going to use them for, if you have one pair of skis or four pairs, what kind of skier you are, what terrain you ski, what your aspirations are — if you want to get better at one thing or another, we can try and help with that,” he says. “And then we pick a shape and a length, and from that shape and a length we customize the camber, the rocker, the flex and you get to choose any one of these graphics. There isn’t a particular graphic associated with a particular model. We also do custom graphics.”
Courtesy Romp Skis
A pair of custom skis from Romp starts at $1,050, which as Caleb pointed out, is in line with a high-end European ski.
“And you can get a custom product for the same price,” he says. “You will feel the difference. When skis are made custom to you, it’s like you get on them and you just feel how they’re perfect for you.”
Romp Skis are made on a first come first serve basis. In-season wait times are usually three to six weeks.