2 weeks Ago
Adam Vernon, owner of Colorado Ski Furniture in Manitou Springs, accomplished what so many aspiring entrepreneurs dream of achieving. He took a quirky hobby — in his case, repurposing used skis and snowboards into personalized furniture — and grew it into his full-time job, with approximately 30 employees and a customer base with the likes of the Tiger Woods Foundation, Pepsi and Facebook. With a few pairs of unwanted skis, basic skills in woodworking and the desire for a big, cool, comfy seat, Vernon made his first Adirondack-style chair in 2007 inside the garage of his home in Manitou Springs.
“Growing up in the Midwest, everybody I knew just had those chairs,” Vernon said. “I’m a big dude, and I have about a dozen sports injuries I’m always nursing so I just want to be comfortable with a nice chair.” Vernon started turning unwanted ski gear from garage sales, friends and gear shops into usable, durable artsy furniture.
Since then, Vernon has scaled up his operation to include a retail lot (fenced-in using old skis) on Manitou Avenue and a woodworking shop less than a mile down the road. There, the company’s craftsmen sand, stain and drill wood chairs. Despite collecting and repurposing roughly 2,000 skis a year with the capacity to make eight chairs a day, Colorado Ski Furniture’s products are made by hand, a skill Vernon said took him and his team a long time to perfect from finding the ideal paint to the right screws.
While Vernon doesn’t claim exclusivity in making the first or only Adirondack ski chairs, he does believe he is the only seller when it comes to custom painting them, a task his hired artists do from home. “There’s a lot of little companies, one man shows, trying to make them out of their garage copying us.” But Vernon appreciates the notoriety his brand has gained, a reason why the company also started hot branding the chairs’ wood with the Colorado Ski Furniture logo.
“We used to not really have that,” Rivera said. “So maybe now if you see the chairs anywhere it can hopefully have a little recognition.” While Colorado Ski Furniture might be known for its ski chairs, the company builds much more than that from the smallest items such as ski bindings that become cup holders to chair lifts that become a porch swing.
published Sept. 2023.
