How This Ski Repair Shop In France Started A Global Movement

Tessa Dunthorne discovers how one ski repair hub started by championing the circular economy for snowsports – and set into motion a wave of change for the entire outdoor industry. 

How One Ski Repair Shop Is Transforming Its Industry For Greener Good

‘I don’t like the word “scale”,’ says Gavin Fernie- Jones. ‘For three reasons: I’ve owned two very busy ski shops, I have two young children, and I quite like my life.’

In fact, Gavin’s work has scale whether or not likes it or not – his snowsports-equipment repair hub in Bozel is setting a precedent for other resorts around the world to take heed and set up similar operations. 

Skiing and other snowsports are increasingly challenged by the climate crisis. You need only read about the melting glaciers and curtailed winter ski seasons to understand the effect rising temperatures are having – and, in part, the industry has had a hand in helping to increase emissions. A study by Ademe observes that a 52 percent of the carbon emissions around skiing are linked to transport. But a surprising 16 percent of the load is from equipment – clothes and gear.

This is where Gavin comes in. It began with a ‘fix it’ tour in 2019, in Bozel, France. ‘We wanted to create an event that might bring the community together,’ he says. ‘So we assembled friends and a local seamstress for a pop-up workshop.’

No stranger to the myriad ways in which ski gear can see wear on the mountains, the British seasonaire-turned-alpine-expat focused initially on empowering his neighbourhood – with guidance from the seamstress – to fix up their own salopettes, jackets and gloves. Local sports instructors helped residents to (eco-)wax their skis. This expert help was crucial to the purpose of the pop-up. ‘We wanted to change mountain industries into a focus for good – so communities could take a stand [themselves] against climate change.’

This inspired a tour to Meribel and Morzine, and later a permanent presence in Bozel: the One Tree at a Time community hub provides a repair workshops, and a small operation repairing and reselling snowsports gear.

Repairing salopettes

In particular, there’s a climatic friction point with ski uniforms that One Tree aims to address. ‘Many ski schools are reliant on brands, like North Face, to provide their kit [often for free]. These brands change their colourway each year and so, when schools renew their kit, a lot of the older stuff is now defunct because they need all their instructors to have the same visual identity on the mountain.’

‘Until now, they’d scrap all the old kit and use the new gear whether instructors needed it or not.’

One Tree’s solution is to take the old season’s gear and patch over the logos with its own iconography. A jacket might then go on sale for €40, comparatively low for adventure-graded equipment. There’s a free swap rail for children’s clothing, too.

Linoprinting new images and logos onto older skiwear

‘We never wanted to try to replicate One Tree at a Time,’ says Gavin, ‘but we did want the ideas to spread across sports communities. Could it work with surfing, sailing, hiking or climbing…?’

In 2022, Gavin began a not-for-profit organisation called Re-Action Collective with Heather Davies. This brought together five other similar ‘founding’ groups all aiming to build on the idea of circular economy practices at a community level.

‘We now have 45 members around the world, as well as sharing platforms and peer-to-peer rental platforms that form part of the collective,’ says Gavin. ‘We communicate daily on Discord to share ideas and we run pop-ups – for example, at John Lewis on Oxford Street a few weeks back – where we talk about the secondhand and circular economies.’

‘Coming together as a collective means we’ve got so much more agency, more power to do things and far more reach,’ says Gavin. ‘The answer to fixing everything is all of us.’

Fixing everything, indeed. From the skis up. 

re-action-collective.org