Salomon’s new Addikt Pro on-piste carving ski uses technology from the company’s racing range to deliver the feeling of carving the perfect turn to more skiers.
A Slalom-inspired ski with a radical racing design, the Addikt Pro incorporates Salomon’s iconic racing flag in its top sheet to subtly pay homage to the company’s rich racing history. Available in greater numbers in the fall of 2023, the ski is engineered to combine high-performance technologies with the forgiveness qualities needed to make on-piste turns more, well, addictive.
Each Addikt ski also features a unique sidewall colour design created from a new construction technique that utilizes recycled material (details below).
Whether making sharp, short turns or arcing longer, faster turns with stability, the Addikt Pro is extremely agile and playful thanks to its 66mm slalom sidecut. From Salomon’s World Cup winning fleet of race skis, the Addikt Pro utilizes Salomon’s proven Blade technology, which fuses flexible polymer pads in the Titanium layer that make the ski easier to bend so skier’s enjoy powerful turns longer. To add a layer of support to the ski, Salomon developed the Addikt-exclusive Motion Tail technology, which increases tail flexibility by 5% to create a more forgiving yet responsive all-day ski. The Addikt Pro’s sibling, the Addikt ski, will be hitting stores in the fall of 2023, when both skis will be more widely distributed.
Waste material created by the ski production process was collected, recycled, and re-used in the sidewall construction of the Addikt range.
Salomon’s winter sports designers and R&D team members also found a way to reduce the Addikt Pro’s environmental impact by using fully recycled ABS sidewalls in the ski constriction (watch video). This design represents a completely new way for the company to processes factory ABS waste. The multi-coloured sidewalls of the Addikt skis represent a deep shift in how designers and product developers at Salomon look at and use waste to create a unique aesthetic from a consumer perspective.
The recycled sidewalls are the result of a project born from a design exploration into how to valorise raw materials—how to find value in waste materials through their aesthetic appearance. To do so, designers took excess ABS chips that were left-over from the ski sidewall production process and put them into a thermal-compression machine. This allowed the designers to choose the graphic aspect of the multi-coloured chips and create a design using them.
“In the future, the aesthetic codes will change because materials and resources will change,” says Sylvain Merlin, a designer in Salomon’s winter sports department. “Initially, this was a project of design exploration, so we did not include the constraints of development, industrialization or technical usage.”
Now, what began as a test in Salomon ski prototype centre at the company’s Annecy Design Centre, has been fully implemented in the factory and into the Addikt range less than two years later.
“The sidewalls of the Addikt Pro and Addikt skis do not come from virgin, oil-based plastics, but from the material waste of our own production,” said Arnaud de Mondenard, Alpine Ski R&D Manager for Salomon. “When we mill any ski sidewall, 40 to 50% of the material consumed goes to the trash bin as chips. For the Addikt and Addikt Pro skis, these chips are collected, re-fused and turned into a new sidewall. Performance characteristics remain un-changed and waste is reduced by almost half.”
“Depending on the kind of skis produced before, Addikt sidewalls will show different random colours—varying from black to orange to yellow to green,” Arnaud says. “We’ll sometimes have various colours between two pairs, even within a pair, or in between the two sides of one ski.”
There were also improvements made on energy consumption during the Addikt manufacturing process after the team performed a lifecycle analysis on the MTN range of touring skis and implemented changes.
“In the moulding process of the Addikt Pro ski, we reduced the energy needed to press the ski by almost half compared to previous S/MAX ski models,” Arnaud explains. “The beauty of this company and this ski R&D team here in Annecy is we are able to test crazy things in our prototype centre and then transform them to scale in our factories.”
