Young man's innovation may be the next big thing

By Matt Boxler

Next time one of your kids asks for 20 bucks, don’t ask questions … just reach into your wallet and fork it over.

That’s what Stanley Len did when his 23-year-old son Brian emerged from the garage a couple years ago, a little dusty and dirty, but with the proverbial light bulb shining above his head. Little did dad know that Brian would parley that $20 into a budding ski industry revolution.

Brian took the $20 to a local craft store and bought some clay. Then he went to nearby Willard Mountain (Easton, N.Y.), where as a pre-teen he competed on the ski racing team and the Star Program, and managed to collect a handful of used skis and boots at no cost. Back in his aptly located Mechanicville, N.Y. garage, he built a prototype of his brainchild … the Sky Skater.

As of press time for this issue of Snow East, U.S. and global (PCT) patents have been filed, enterprising investors are in discussion with the Lens, and product development teams from both Head and Atomic are reviewing the potential of Brian’s new ski system.

“Needless to say, it has been non-stop for the last few months,” the elder Len said.

What Brian put together with, in essence, bailing wire and chewing gum, has captured the attention of many important people in the snowsports industry. Designed to perform intricate tricks on the rails of terrain parks, the Sky Skater is a product that combines Brian’s two beloved sports, skiing and inline skating.

The system consists of a boot with a platform frame transition into a 19-inch ski (the ski length varies with the skier’s shoe size), all fused into one piece. The ski is situated where the wheels of an inline skate would be, and its flat surface is interrupted just once by a singular concave groove carved perpendicularly from edge to edge beneath the center of the foot.

The perpendicular groove naturally locks onto the rail when the skier slides sideways and is designed to be ridden on the rail flat, or for grinding along one or both edges.

The platform design that fuses the boot’s bottom to the ski is what really sets the Sky Skater apart from a traditional short ski or snow blade, multiplying the number of tricks and “grinds” a rider can perform on the rails.

Connected to the boot’s sole is a plastic platform shaped wider than the bottom of the boot and 1 5/8 inches deep. This wider platform is then fused to the ski by strip that elevates the boot from the ski to form 90-degree “groove” along both the inside and outside boot “edges.”

“The action is in the terrain park and the Sky Skater is ready-made for this,” Brian said. “I want the kids to be able to do the same thing on the snow that they can do on land. When I enter the jam rails this year, I’m going to knock their socks off. No one has ever seen anything like this.”

At the end of last season, Brian took his Sky Skaters out for their initial test run in the terrain park at Willard Mountain. Not only did he have a blast on them, but his new and unique “sport” attracted a ton of attention. The same thing happened a week later when he brought them up to West Mountain in Glens Falls, N.Y.

“He came back into the lodge and a group of kids were around him asking questions,” Stanley said. “One kid offered him $50 to buy them.”

Momentum really kicked into gear in October (2006) when the Lens showed off the Sky Skaters at the Albany Ski and Snowboard Expo. The duo handed out 700 stickers and flyers, Brian was the feature of local TV news segments and he was invited to demo the product at a local resort’s terrain park grand opening.

The Sky Skater booth attracted the particular attention of snowboarding legend, Olympic gold medalist Ross Powers, who sauntered over a half dozen times to express his interest in the new product. Even Powers’ wife came over to see what the buzz was all about.

“Ross told us it was the most interesting thing he’d seen in five years,” Stanley said. “Based on a scale of 1 to 10, the ski show was a 12 for us.”

The potential numbers now associated with the Sky Skater are substantially higher, and Stanley marvels at that $20 and Brian using the family oven to bake clay molds.

“I said to him, ‘Brian, you’re a genius.’”