Outdoor Retailer - Winter 2017 - 53

Feature
.03

FORMER TECH WHIZ JASON BORRO
TURNED HIS LOVE OF THE NICHE SPORT OF SKI MOUNTAINEERING
INTO A RUNAWAY ONLINE-RETAIL SUCCESS STORY. NOW HE IS MOVING
INTO THE REAL WORLD WITH A HANDS-ON, BRICK-AND-MORTAR
STORE FOCUSED ON BRINGING SKIMO TO THE MASSES.

mo-ticulous
-ticulous
Motivations
By Matt Hart

Photographs by CARLO NASISSE

When you walk into the Skimo Co ski shop near the mouth of Big Cottonwood

canyon in Salt Lake City, the first thing you notice is that it's really blue-'SkiMo Blue', as they call it.
The very next thing you notice is the ski technician's workbench-which in most shops is normally
hidden from view-front and center in the shop. On any given day you can find store owner Jason
Borro, or his ski tech Eric Bunce, meticulously obsessing over a binding mount with the smell of
epoxy in the air. ¶ Skimo Co, which is short for The Ski Mountaineering Company, is a specialty retailer with a light-and-fast ethos. The shop caters to a contingent of athlete-explorers and weightweenie racers who know that there is safety in speed and beauty in simplicity. Skimo Co sells niche
skis, boots, and bindings largely ignored by the mainstream ski retailers and ski media. You won't
find any of Outside magazine's "Gear of the Year" in the shop-sorry, no Marker Duke frame bindings. Instead, Skimo Co caters to skiers who go equally as hard on the uphill as they do the downhill.
And the shop is killing it.

THAT SUCCESS STARTS WITH UNDERSTANDor you will have to start all over again and drill
ing SkiMo customers. When most of your day
new holes in the ski. "I've been mounting and in
is spent skinning up the mountain you will then
the ski industry for 20-something years," said
ski down, every ounce of extra weight matters.
Bunce. "I came into this job getting mounts
Take bindings, for example: to keep them as
within a millimeter of perfect; Jason has stanlight as possible, ski-mountaineering race
dardized getting it within a half millimeter."
bindings have no elaborate sys"They mount skis better than
anyone, to the millimeter and
tem to accommodate differentsized boots. This means they
within tenths of a degree of square,"
TUNED IN
Jason Borro's tech
generally offer no size adjustsaid president of United States
mind brings precision
ability. The tech pins in the heel
Ski Mountaineering Association,
to each item he sells in
have to line up close to perfectly
Nick Francis. "Jason is an engineer
his Salt Lake City shop.

through and through." It's this attention to detail that has allowed Borro to take his fledgling
side project from successful online specialty
retailer to an actual brick-and-mortar store
serving the greater Salt Lake City backcountry
community.
Borro, 40, somehow fills all the checkboxes for computer engineer and endurance athlete-six foot tall, buzzed cut, rail thin, and unshaven. He was born in Peoria, Illinois, and at
age three his family moved to Dubuque, Iowa.
He grew up skiing Sundown Mountain, the
largest resort in the state, with six lifts and
475 feet of vertical drop. He then attended
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois,
and received a degree in computer engineering. After college he bounced around the world,
from Europe to San Francisco, working on
project-based software development for companies like BP, Caterpillar, Dell, Microsoft, and
Allstate. In 2006 the powder dream drew him
to Salt Lake City.

TO UNDERSTAND WHY BORRO'S BUSINESS
has met with such success, you must understand the Salt Lake Valley's geography; its surrounding mountains are a dreamscape for a
motivated backcountry skier. You open your
door in the parking lot and it hits the slopes
you will ski, no long, involved, multi-hour approach to the goods-it's literally right there.
And although the Pacific Northwest might get
more total snowfall per year, that snow, on average, has a water density of 18 percent. Utah's
Wasatch range averages 8.5 percent, which
equates to better powder, as anyone who's skied
both will attest.
It's not just the snow quality alone, however,
that makes this one of the best places on Earth
to backcountry ski. The terrain is so close to
Salt Lake City that it has become famous for
the "dawn patrol" phenomenon, where nonprofessional skiers-regular joes with nine-tofive jobs-are able to climb a mountain and ski
world-class powder before showing up to work
in the city, on time, later that same morning.
Those are Borro's dedicated customers.
FRUSTRATION IS THE GENESIS OF MANY
sound business ideas, and in 2011 Borro was
feeling just that. After moving from the best-inclass ski resorts of the Wasatch into the backcountry, and then to the ski-mountaineering
Winter 2017 / OUTDOOR RETAILER 53

Outdoor Retailer - Winter 2017

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