Founded in the French Alps , Rossignol has been inspiring the mountain experience since An overview of Rossignol history and development through 10 key dates. Probably the same thing as Roger Abondance a hundred years later, retired, a former racing star who admits to dreaming at night that he still manufactures skis. They signed a sponsoring agreement, probably the first of its kind! Boix-Vives was 29 years old and immediately decided to concentrate production on the ski, dropping the wood-turning business.
He made sure he had the support of Emile Allais. In , 8, pairs were manufactured yearly; five years later, this figure would be 50,; in , 8, pairs a day left the Group's international factories. He would turn the craftsman's business into an industrial leader in its sector. Bandit and Scratch were to become the iconic Skis of this period regeneraring the ski industry. The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.
The meet drew plenty of attention from the press, and nearly 3, spectators showed up. Among them was Abel Rossignol, who immediately conceived a passion for the sport and decided to make his own gear, for sale.
Lieutenant R. They sold well, and he won first prize at a manufacturing trade show in Chamonix in Then, in , in order to study the sport and trade, he traveled to Scandinavia, visiting all the principal factories.
The same year he began participating in the annual meeting of the Touring Club of France. After the war, the company pursued its twin businesses—weaving-machinery parts and skis—and furnished skis for some of the athletes in the first winter Olympic Games at Chamonix in It was the start of a long involvement with world-class competition. Abel Rossignol, Jr. In , Allais began working with Rossignol, especially on new skis for racers. These were critical years in the evolution of ski racing.
For one thing, between and alpine racers began clamping their heels down with the new Kandahar bindings; this permitted the Austrian Toni Seelos and Allais to innovate a precise and powerful new parallel race turn. With Allais, Abel Jr. A heavier version for downhill and GS was laminated of hickory. Among the stars using Rossignol Olympique skis was Henri Oreiller , the first World and Olympic Champion in downhill in —it was the first year the downhill and slalom medals were separated from the combined medal.
The postwar years comprised another era of technical ferment. By Michal and an aircraft engineer in the U. Emile Allais left for America in to help build lifts and trails in Quebec and, the following summer, at Portillo, Chile. Then he coached racers in Canada and at Sun Valley, landing at Squaw Valley in as ski school director.
He coached the U. Ski Team at Oslo in Then he returned to France in to help develop the new ski resort at Courchevel. He brought along several pairs of the new-fangled Head metal skis, dropping at least one pair off with Abel, Jr. Abel Rossignol died in at age 72, and Abel, Jr. However, in , the textile manufacturing business collapsed and the Rossignol factory ran into serious financial trouble. At this point Allais contacted Laurent Boix-Vives, a young Savoyard entrepreneur whom he had met at Courchevel in the course of building ski lifts and trails.
Laurent Boix-Vives. Del Mulkey photo. Boix-Vives, son of a local grocer in Brides-les-Bains, was born in , and at age 10 had watched Allais win local races. At 18, near the end of the war, his father took him out of school to work in the grocery business, setting up new shops in the tiny mountain towns.
Knowing the mountains well, Boix-Vives explored sites suitable for ski trails, focusing on the village of Moriond, which soon became Courchevel In , the state government began offering contracts to develop lifts there; Boix-Vives jumped on the opportunity and got permission to build six lifts at Bozel, serving about 2, vertical feet of terrain, most of it tree skiing down to the valley towns below Courchevel. Eventually he built 21 lifts between Courchevel and La Plagne, and two at la Tania.
He told his father the lifts would mean more grocery business. And he was right. When Allais put him together with Rossignol, Boix-Vives was enthusiastic. His first move was to focus all activities on skiing. He dropped the weaving business, and reorganized product development under the technical supervision of Emile Allais and Abel Jr.
Adrien Duvillard, one of the top French racers of the era, did some of their on-snow testing. In Duvillard used the black-topped Allais 60 ski to win the French downhill championship, and the following winter he won every downhill of the season—except the Olympic downhill, in which teammate Jean Vuarnet won the gold medal at Squaw Valley on the Allais The red-topped commercial version was branded the Allais Major, and it proved to be a great GS ski.
Boix-Vives concentrated on developing racers, and helped to organize the French factory pool in support of the team. A project was launched to develop sales in Europe Italy, Switzerland, Germany first, and then in the U. Boix, accompanied by Duvillard and Allais, made an initial trip abroad in , and he hired Lee Russel—father of the future racing star Patrick Russel—as international marketing director.
Russell struck a deal with Duvillard to race in North America and Japan on Rossignol skis, and Duvillard folded these trips into the product-testing cycle. Later, the brand would be handled by national sporting goods wholesalers: first, Garcia which sold Fischer, Marker, and Humanic as well , and later by Wolverine World Wide, the Michigan-based boot company that was already importing Le Trappeur products.
At this point, Rossignol began sending French ski coaches over to manage its North American sales. The cast would eventually include Henri Patty and Gerard Rubaud. By , too, fiberglass was becoming available in commercial quantities. The switch proved to be a wise move. With the previous models, Rossignol was producing a few hundred skis a year.
After they started making laminated skis, production leaped to thousands by the early s. It only produced several thousand skis a year, and it still created wooden parts. The company experienced serious financial difficulties.
Under this economic duress, the company chose to stick to making skis, and let the wooden parts division go. The revitalized Skis Rossignol took advantage of this trend and quickly established itself as a new multinational skiing entity. It continued to innovate with the design and materials ofskis.
The company unveiled its first skis with no wood components in the s and soon began experimenting on plastic skis. Today, Skis Rossignol is one of the largest ski manufacturers in the world. It has numerous subsidiary companies, which produce and sell accouterments, such as ski boots and the like.
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