Icelantic Skis Moves Headquarters to Outskirts of Golden, Colorado

It’s the end of an era for Icelantic Skis. 

After spending more than a decade operating in a lodge in downtown Golden, Colorado, Icelantic Skis is moving. The brand is moving all operations to a new building at 15744 W. 6th Ave., near the Interstate 70 and 6th Avenue intersection on the outskirts of Golden. At the new location, skiers can now pick up new skis, demos, and get tunes all in the same spot.

Despite the move, the scenery isn’t changing too much for Icelantic. The brand had already been operating its tune shop in the new 2,000-square-foot building for about a year and a half. The building was previously the Denver Sports Lab, but after purchasing the brand, Icelantic rebranded it to Golden Ski Tunes. The move brings Icelantic’s tune shop, retail store, and demo center all to the same spot. Director of operations John Douthit believes that consolidating operations to one building will reduce confusion for customers.

“That retail area (in the previous downtown Golden spot) was awesome for brand awareness, but no one was walking in there and accidentally walking out with an $800 pair of skis,” Douthit said in a Denver Post article. “We’d get a lot of ‘what do you guys have to do with Iceland?’ They’d walk out with maybe a candle or a $30 T-shirt.”

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With just 10 full-time employees, Icelantic does not need a ton of space to run its company. The new building has enough office space for the full-timers, as well as the business’s three seasonal employees who help with tunes during winter.

Along with switching up the location for its retail and demo center, Icelantic plans to tweak its business plan as well. Back at the shop in downtown Golden, Icelantic sold dozens of shirts and other soft goods to build brand recognition of the Icelantic logo and name. At the new location, Douthit plans to dial down its soft good offerings to urge customers to buy its core product: skis.

“Those were great for branding and good for brand awareness, but we make our money off of skis,” he said in the article. “So let’s make sure we invest in our customers and the customer experience and make it easier for them to buy from us.”

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In a broader company-wide effort, Icelantic is aiming to balance its direct-to-consumer sales with wholesale. Currently, direct-to-consumer sales account for only 30% of the brand’s sales. In an effort to bolster its DTC numbers, Icelantic launched a new Website to further promote buying directly from the company. The new website was designed with a simpler interface and to contain more information about Icelantic’s skis and their on-mountain performance.

According to Douthit and the Denver Post, the company would like for wholesale and DTC sales to be split in half, but different external forces cause shifts. 

“We have wild fluctuations on annual volume sales because it’s so weather-dependent, but we aim for more of a 50-50 revenue split,” Douthit said. “That’s a fluctuating plan at times, too.”

While the goal is to boost direct-to-consumer sales, Icelantic has found fresh success in wholesale. The brand recently released two new skis — the Tempest and Torrent — which have drawn significant attention from customers buying Icelantic skis from popular online retailers like Evo.

Icelantic’s skis are currently manufactured in Denver at the Never Summer factory. Never Summer is a Colorado-based snowboard brand.

“The brand was built on the back of wholesale, so we’re really tight with them,” Douthit said. “The industry went up during COVID and then down out of COVID, and with that, wholesale has fallen off.”

With the move to its new location, Icelantic hopes it can simplify the customer experience while also increasing its direct-to-consumer sales. The move consolidates all of Icelantic’s operations to one building, allowing skiers to make just one trip when working with the brand. As ski season approaches in North America and Colorado, people making last-minute gear purchases could look to Icelantic for American-built skis. And with a new website and retail space, getting Icelantic skis has never been easier.