ISPO Brandnew Award ceremony

ORIGINAL+ is ISPO Brandnew overall winner 2019. The sports start-up impressed the jury with custom-made skis.

If you wanted to see nothing but happy faces, Hall B4 at ISPO was the place to be recently. Because that’s where sports start-ups could present themselves to the public within the ISPO Brandnew Area – creating a special atmosphere between pride and excitement at the trade show.

The 50 finalists, who were allowed to exhibit at the world's largest sports fair, emerged from hundreds of applications. This year, the twelve-member ISPO Brandnew jury had a particularly hard time choosing their favorites – to finally select seven winners.

These are the winners of ISPO Brandnew 2019.

Founder and Managing Director of ORIGINAL+, Siegfried Rumpfhuber, was at the center of celebration for being ISPO Brandnew Overall Winner 2019.

His start-up company from Salzburg (Austria) offers custom-made skis that can be individually adapted to the customer's skiing style and terrain. "Our skis consist of 32 components, so we can build them in 600 different ways," explains Rumpfhuber, who worked and tested skis for two large ski companies for years and came up with his innovation, which won him the overall victory in the sports start-up competition.

Individual ski production with satisfaction guarantee

The principle is quite simple: A customer specifies his or her individual parameters such as riding style, riding ability, but also weight, size, age and region ("in Colorado the snow crystals are completely different than in South Tyrol"). A software based on artificial intelligence then calculates which combination of ski width, ski length, ski stiffness, binding setup and ski tuning is best for the customer.

Despite individualization and production in Austria, ORIGINAL + skis sell for 700 to 800 Euros – a common price level for skis off the rack. "In addition, we give the customer a satisfaction guarantee," says Rumpfhuber, "anyone who is not happy with our skis will get their money back or new skis – but that has only been the case once so far.

This article was first published at www.ispo.com. Read the full article here.

We’re still super stoked about being the overall winner of the ISPO Brandnew Award and we look back at ISPO 2019 with gratitude.