COVID-19 & Skiing Podcast #7: Doppelmayr USA President Katharina Schmitz – “We Are Used to Making Adjustments”

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What this is: This is the sixth in a series of short conversations exploring the fallout to the ski industry from the COVID-19-forced closure of nearly every ski area on the continent in March 2020. Click through to listen to the first five: author Chris Diamond, Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher, Magic Mountain President Geoff Hatheway, NSAA CEO Kelly Pawlak, Berkshire East/Catamount Owner & Goggles for Docs founder Jon Schaefer.

Who: Jeff Thompson, partner and cofounder of Shaggy’s Copper Country Skis in Boyne City, Michigan

Why I interviewed him: Because as America has fractured along political fault lines over the past few decades, the bring-it-together ethos of the nation’s finest moments seemed ever more distant and improbable. It was with a sense of amazement bordering on disbelief that I would read about the titanic wartime effort of the 1940s, when American manufacturing channeled its full might and ingenuity into assembling one of the greatest war machines in history. In December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. By February 1942, automakers were retooling their factories for airplane, tank, and truck manufacturing. Factories of all kinds made similar pivots. This enormous and immediate output helped win World War II, and much of that effort took place in Michigan. When COVID-19 pounced out of the viral shadows this winter and began its inexorable creep across our globalized and interconnected world, the medical establishment everywhere was as short of medical supplies as the United States was of battle-ready Jeeps and bombers in 1941. Now, as then, small and large manufacturers of all sizes are applying their expertise in making things to the enormous and urgent project before them. American manufacturing in 2020 is not what it was in 1941, when the nation was one of the world’s great factory hubs. But the work ethic, the energy, the problem-solving intelligence, and the compulsion to meet a problem and punch it in the face remain. When the scope of the COVID-19 crisis began to settle over our nation, Shaggy’s Copper Country Skis, like small manufacturers across the country, shut their regular production lines and retooled for crisis. A custom ski shop, Shaggy’s is now cranking out 5,000 face masks per day for front-line medical workers, playing a small but vital role in this unfolding pandemic. That is a story I wanted to hear.

What we talked about: Even as the world falls apart good things still happen, and one of those good things was Jeff having his first child just as the shutdown was taking hold across the country; what inspired Shaggy’s to shut down ski production and how they honed in on face shields as an area of need they could help fulfill; the trial-and-error process of going from prototype to production; making things is a deeply ingrained family habit (that stretches back more than a century), and the Thompsons have more than one small factory locked into this effort; the practical challenges of pivoting from boutique custom ski production to high-volume repetitive stamping out of a single identical item; how Shaggy’s modified...