Salt Lake City-based DPS Skis is saying “Wax is Dead” with its new Phantom permanent base treatment — and surpassed its $35,000 Kickstarter goal in just four hours; then exceeded that goal by 100 percent in less than 24 hours, with total sales of almost $300,000.
Kickstarter backers will start receiving product soon and DPS has partnered with Backcountry.com for an initial retail launch, but they welcome dealer inquiries at the show.
The brand is hoping to protect the health of ski shop employees and athletes as well as prevent superfluous PFCs from being released into the atmosphere. And at the same time eliminating the need for most skiers to wax on a weekly basis, making the skiing and riding experience more enjoyable and easier.
DPS Skis, innovators of carbon skis and snowsports technologies since 2005, says Phantom is a permanent, one-time application base-penetrating formula that will forever eliminate the need for waxing skis and snowboards.
Available now through a 30-day Kickstarter campaign with special early bird pricing, the disruptive solution, the company believes, could be the beginning of a new era for snowsports performance.
“Phantom’s approach is a truly innovative scientific advancement. It’s a recipe that simply works day after day, tune after tune, and forever fundamentally changes our conception and approach to fast-running boards designed for daily use,” said Stephan Drake, founder and CEO of DPS Skis. “We came across a history of different alternative solutions attempting to solve the wax problem, but nothing was deemed competitive. We then began a developmental relationship with a group of top material scientists to research and attack the problem via an advanced free radical polymerization approach.”
It’s got some very interesting performance characteristics that could be especially appealing to snowboarders. Developed by a team of chemists and material science engineers, Phantom’s patent-pending formula creates a hydrophobic environment that offers three undeniable benefits.
First, unlike wax, Phantom is only applied once and permanently alters ski and board bases to make them both faster and harder for the life of the product. Second, Phantom offers consistently fast on-snow gliding performance across a broad range of conditions and temperatures. Third, and most importantly, Phantom is made up of non-reactive chemical functional groups that are both inert to the environment and safe to those applying it – something that traditional waxes have never been able to achieve.
Initial research and development was extensive, with 50 compound variations having been explored and tested in both the laboratory and in the mountains of Utah, Chile and New Zealand. Lab results of the final formula correlated the hydrophobicity, coefficient of friction, shore hardness and full base penetration with test ski days in every condition, including manmade snow, midwinter groomed snow, fresh powder and warm spring snow.
For more information about Phantom, visit the Kickstarter page.
Located at the base of the Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake City, Utah, DPS designs “the world’s most advanced ski products” by fusing space age carbon technology with groundbreaking shapes. DPS is responsible for the world’s first and only pure pre-pregnated carbon fiber sandwich ski, the first 120mm-waisted powder pintail, the first rockered ski with sidecut, the Spoon – a convex three-dimensional shoveled ski with radical edge bevel, and now Phantom, a potentially paradigm-shifting permanent, one time application base-coating that forever eliminates the need for waxing skis and snowboards.
DPS products are sold on five continents and are the trusted brand of choice for serious skiers worldwide.