We Are Elevenate

Since 2010

Elevenate was founded in Åre, Sweden, by two people with twenty years in the Alps and some six thousand ski days between them. Sara Rönngren, a competitive free skier and designer. Jimmy Odén, an IFMGA mountain guide. They had seen most of what a mountain can do to a garment, and to the person inside it.

They had designed skiwear for other brands. What they wanted was to make it without the shortcuts. A cut that moves with the body and protects it, with no spare fabric. The seams under the most strain folded, glued and sewn. Fabrics that held up year after year, not ones that photographed well. The free skier’s feel for movement and the mountain guide’s refusal to compromise on equipment had to meet in the same garment.

That was the standard in 2010. It still is, and it runs through the company: a design team with several decades of skiwear behind them, and around them people who ski a great deal and would rather build something than manage it. The mountains outside Åre do the first round of testing; the skiers we work with do the rest, through whole winters, and tell us what fails.

The way we build

We make technical skiwear — shells and pants, insulation, midlayers and base layers — for resort and backcountry skiing. The pieces are cut to work together, because that is how they get worn.

The work starts with how a body moves on skis, and with what a long day does to the garment. Cold on the chair, wind on the ridge, wet snow in April, the abrasion of edges and pack straps and a season of washing. Fit, durability and freedom of movement are settled first. Everything else follows from them.

The design is Scandinavian in the plain sense: clean lines, purposeful construction, materials chosen for performance rather than excess. A feature is there because a skier needs it — a pocket where a hand goes, a vent where heat builds — or it isn’t there at all. What is left out is as deliberate as what is in.

Each garment is made to last and to be repaired. The most responsible garment is the one that doesn’t need replacing. 

Who we build for

Elevenate is made for skiers who organize their winters around time on snow.

Some of them ski the resort. Season pass, first chair, the grooming report read over coffee. Forty days of hardpack, wind and spring slush, technique refined one carved turn at a time. They need a shell that works on icy morning corduroy and doesn’t look like armour when the lifts close.

Some of them earn their turns. The avalanche bulletin before breakfast, skins on at the trailhead at seven, ninety minutes of climbing for one line in stable snow, and the judgement to leave it when the snowpack says no. They need gear that is light on the way up, protective on the ridge, and laid out where a touring skier’s hands actually go.

Different days. The same skier, more or less: experienced, exacting, done with the reading long before they get to us, and unmoved by a claim until the gear has backed it up. Someone who doesn’t need a logo to explain what they do.

We don’t make skiwear for everyone, and we don’t try to. We make it for people who ski hard and often, and who expect what they wear to keep up.

Everything we are, built for skiers.