Collection:
Salomon Outdoor
Annecy, 1947.
François Salomon opens a fifty-square-metre workshop with his wife Jeanne and son Georges, producing saw blades and ski edges whose bevelled profile he immediately patents.
Post-war France is funnelling the first tourists into the Alps, and young Georges, studying engineering in the evenings, spots the opportunity: he builds an automated edge-production machine and turns the family workshop into a technology company.
Then comes the idea that changes skiing — a safety binding that releases the boot in a fall.
By 1972, Salomon is the world’s largest binding manufacturer and gradually adds boots, cross-country systems and the first monocoque skis.
It enters the new millennium as a complete mountain brand, and in 2013 releases the XT-6, a technical model for ultra-trail runners in the toughest terrain.
And here the story takes a turn nobody in Annecy planned: the aggressive silhouette of the XT-6 captivates the fashion world, and a shoe built for hundreds of kilometres in the mountains turns up on the streets of Paris, New York and Tokyo and on fashion runways.
Salomon didn’t intend it — at least not through marketing.
It simply made equipment so well for seventy years that fashion found it on its own.
From a tiny saw-blade workshop to the pinnacle of mountains and streets alike.
Without a single concession on function, which is precisely why the whole thing works.
More
