Once upon a time, in the land of early new-school skiing, in 2002, various legends in freeskiing such as Tanner Hall, J.P Auclair, Julien Regnier, and more created the brand known as Armada Skis out of a basement. The company set out to create exclusively freestyle twin-tipped skis, bravely pioneering freeskiing along with core brands at the time such as Line, Ninthward, and a few others. These brave soldiers created this brand to create skis to ski the way they wanted to ski. Their first skis were the Armada ARV (Armada Radical Vibe) and the AR5, a tribute to the original 5 Armada skiers. They were the first truly rider-owned and rider-manufactured freestyle ski brands to come around.
After Armada was initially kick-started, immediately they began supporting their own riders as well as others and various events in skiing, bringing a very strong and well-respected name to the table of new school skiing and very quickly. Armada was the absolute fucking shit, no modern ski company today is as badass as Armada once was in its beginnings. The brand image, what the brand did, and the skis were all just almost too good.
Over time, Armada remained rider owned until about somewhere between 2015-2017 when Erik Snyder, Armada's CEO, sold the company to Amer Sports Corp., a large corporation that sells shit for countless different sports to over 100 countries... This was the official point Armada became no longer a core brand anymore, where they were previously, by definition, one of the most core...
Currently, Armada still makes fun skis and sponsors valid athletes, but have lost their direct involvement in freeskiing that originally made them such a fucking good brand everyone loved. They aren't owned and made by riders, they sponsor less projects and events, and the skis became shittier. In addition, since Amer Sports bought Armada, they fucking sold themselves to an even bigger corporate Chinese company in 2019, Anta Sports, making Armada even more distance from newschool skiing than ever before.
This, my fellow newschoolers members, is why Armada is no longer core.
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