I love skiing as much as you guys. I’ve been an avid NS’er for four or five years. Mostly a reader but sometimes commenting. I made the switch to twin-tips after 11 years of racing. Being the typical teenage skier I wanted to stay in involved in the ski world. Since my skiing abilities weren’t going to get me paid for anything, I decided I needed to go an alternate route.
Growing up in a major wine community, Walla Walla, Washington, I was surrounded by wine constantly. More than I would’ve liked to tell you the truth. I was working/being-the-grunt at a winery with five other women who ran the tasting room. After I made my first ski wine rack http://www.skiwineracks.com . I took it out to them to see if they could sell it in the tasting room for me. They respectfully giggled and declined. Dejected and disappointed I put the rack up stairs in the employee kitchen and left for the weekend.
When I returned there was a piece of paper with an order from the five women for thirteen wine racks.
This is where I got my motivation back.
Time passed and a year later I decided to start my own business or at least try to. The problem was that I was broke and still depending on the parents for everything that my regular job couldn’t pay for.
Then I inherited $4,000 in gold coins from my grandparents passing away. For some reason my mom let me have complete control of the money. Being only a freshman college student I was pretty surprised by this. This gave me the opportunity to screw up big time… but I didn’t.
I decided to use the money as an investment not to make more money, but to learn how to make more money. I would use all of it to get me on my feet for manufacturing and selling wine racks. I made a goal when I first started to not worry so much about making money from selling the wine racks, but to learn about the whole entrepreneurship “voyage” of starting a business from registering with the state to getting distributors. That was 9 months ago, and here I am today.
With many lessons learned, I’ve reached my goal of getting everything rolling. Now its time to try and make that money.
http://www.skiwineracks.com
A message for NS.
I am attending Sierra Nevada College and trying majoring in business. This is located two blocks away from Lake Tahoe and 5 minutes away from the nearest ski hill. In class I am around many kids like us that are obsessed with the ski/snowboard scene. I see a correlation with NS and my buddies at school. All those who aspire to be in the ski industry usually stick to clothing design and sales. It is obvious that this is a market that is hard to enter because of all the big guys. So to all NS use your creativeness, that most of you have, to step outside the “mainstream” business ideas and find a small niche that you have a better chance of entering. Start small.
On the lighter side-
Coming to Tahoe at the end of this summer I emptied out my storage unit that had all of my ski gear and other stuff I didn’t need to haul home in it. This included many plastic tubs with my random things in it, an extra car batter, ski clothes, five pairs of skis, and ski boots.
To make a long story kinda short-
I put all of this stuff into my truck late one night. The next morning I drove to coffee with a buddy and came back. I asked him if he smelled anything weird and he said yeah kinda. I was like hmmmm, that smells like when I cut up the skis for ski wine racks. We both shrugged it off and went inside. We get a knock on our door about 45 minutes later from a random panicking lady in a sweatsuit. She was able tell us, “truck, is fire, a trucks smoking” . We walked outside and saw my truck with smoke billowing out from the canopy. Through the back window you could see flames. I assigned the job of getting a fire extinguisher to my roommate while I stood at the closed canopy in disbelief and confusion. Why is there a fire in my canopy?
The fire extinguisher did the job but it was still smoldering as the fire department showed up with a fire truck, an ambulance, two SUV cop cars, and the fire marshal. (the powerwalk lady called them)
Well the car battery was shorted out by the edge of a ski and smoldered for a while… thus the smelling like cutting up skis.
So once the fire department doused my stuff and pulled it out, they went through all of it to make sure it wasn’t smoldering… no contraband except for 40 roman candles which were confiscated. At least they didn’t give me a ticket.
In the process of pulling my stuff out they were to afraid to pull the car battery out with their hands for obvious reasons so they used a metal pokey-hook rod thing. This tipped the car battery over which had the top melted off of it. This resulted in battery acid pouring all over my paint and just on my truck in general…. I wasn’t happy. They neutralized the acid with some powder stuff and were on their way after a quick explanation and report.
suprisingly not alot was damaged but three pair of my five pair had melted beyond repair or use. my other two pair of foils and pistols survived with minor superficial injuries.
PICTURES
the picture of the walls is just one ski, but they both burned perfectly so i can cut them up and turn them into wine racks.... i have already done this as you can see on the website
