A family penchant for tinkering and fresh tracks gives birth to Michigan-inspired skis with a joy-stoked cult following. We tap into the obsession of Shaggy’s Copper Country Skis.
This article first appeared in Traverse Northern Michigan. Find this story and more when you explore our magazine library. Want Traverse delivered to your door or inbox monthly? View our print subscription and digital subscription options.
It’s 1908, in the heart of the Keweenaw Peninsula’s Copper Country. Imagine a fresh foot—or five—of snow covering a hillside, wrapping around trunks of evergreens and hardwoods like a blanket. In the hushed morning light, a skier breaks the silence. His cheeks are ruddy with cold, breath billowing out, bright eyes looking downhill toward town. Wooden skis slice through the fresh powder. As the man picks up speed, he smiles and whispers a prayer of gratitude: “This is a perfect day.”
It’s a moment that Jeff Thompson often envisions. Jeff and his family own and operate Shaggy’s Copper Country Skis, named after their great-grand-uncle, Sulo “Shaggy” Lehto, who was known for carving skis for family and neighbors on the Keweenaw Peninsula. The lore of Shaggy—his ingenuity, kindness and connection to place—became the through line connecting past to present as the Thompsons turned a teenager’s hobby into a ski-community staple.
Three things are obvious as soon as you step inside Shaggy’s factory in Boyne City: a person may walk in curious about these handcrafted, wide-bodied skis, but they will walk out a convert, and the “factory” scene is more craft than mass production: a handful of folks donning aprons covered in wood glue and sawdust, good tunes in the background, machines still guided by hand, and the smell of milled local hardwoods proving that “local” is more than a catchphrase. It’s what defines the Shaggy’s way of bootstrapped ingenuity and celebration of place.
Photo by Andy Wakeman
Photo by Andy Wakeman
Photo by Andy Wakeman
What has become one of the most beloved boutique ski-building companies in the country didn’t start with industry insiders. Picture a couple of suburban kids from southern Michigan who liked to spend their free time either outside or tinkering in a garage. It’s 2004, and they’ve already had years of building go-karts, already designed and built their own surfboard, and have turned their attention to Frankensteining a bike with skis attached. Because why not?
Jeff and Jonathon Thompson were a perfect duo for the kind of garage workshop magic reserved for teenage brains. Jeff was the one with a pencil stuck behind his ear, drawing out dimensions for each scheme like a future mechanical engineering student would. Jonathon had the grease-stained T-shirts and a mechanic’s curiosity, always up for just figuring it out on the fly. And their dad, John, simply rolled up his sleeves and said “yes” to all their crazy ideas.
“One of our creations happened to be a ski bike that we wanted to mess around on during the downtime at ski races, since we were one of those families that spent every weekend at a hotel, traveling around places like Shanty Creek, Nub’s Nob, Crystal Mountain and Boyne,” Jeff says. “We cut the tips off a pair of old skis to mount onto a bike, and when I looked at the cross-section—the fiber-glass, wood core, steel edges—it just seemed obvious all of a sudden. I was like, ‘I think we could make this.’”
Photo by Andy Wakeman
Jeff is telling this story from his nook office inside the Shaggy’s factory, where skis are still made by a handful of employees from planks of rough-cut Michigan hardwoods like aspen, poplar and ash. He started the company with his parents, John and Shari, and his brother, Jonathon, and he runs it today. As Jeff speaks, the sound of saws occasionally causes him to pause. There’s a sort of rhythm to his words that matches the music of making things. It’s easy to tell he spends most of his days learning to talk in the space between machinery noises.
According to Jeff, the Thompson boys arrived late to the ski world (or late by Up North standards), not setting foot on a hill until second grade. They started as snowboarders, but soon switched to skis, and became a family of “weekend warriors.”
“My parents built a cottage. We all started racing Nastar as a family, and before long I got involved in the competitive ski-racing community,” he remembers. Jeff trained for racing six days a week; his dad coached for South Lyons High School. The family made the trip to Marquette and Mount Bohemia in the Upper Peninsula at least once a year, which, he says, “has always felt a little like coming home.”
Photo by Jon Mon
Jeff pauses in his story and laughs, adding, “To be clear, I was a good ski racer, but I wasn’t great. I loved being out there. I loved being on snow. So it just made sense to me as a high school kid that I should try to build my own pair of skis.”
This is where the Thompson family is probably a little different from most. It’s the “thing behind the thing” that allowed Shaggy’s to go from a garage project to one of the country’s most sought-after boutique ski companies: they know how to take an idea and make it happen. They roll up their literal and figurative sleeves, learn skills as needed along the way and just really like to make stuff.
“My dad wasn’t one to recommend I sit around for a year trying to figure out the ‘how’ of building a ski. He and my brother are much more of the ‘you gotta crack some eggs and try some things’ kind of people. So, we went ahead and figured out how to build a ski press.”
Jeff was 15. His brother was 19 and already had his own business. He had an equipment yard where a building was being torn down, so he just loaded up scraps of steel from there and the two built a press that’s still in use today. “It’s been retrofitted like five times by now and probably needs to be retired,” he says, “but we all kind of love that thing, you know?”
Photo by Andy Wakeman
The first skis the Thompsons ever built were modeled after a straight, thin slalom race ski, with a graphic top layer made from sewing-scrap fabric provided by their mom, Shari.
“The goal was to ski them in Marquette, where I was going for a race that weekend,” Jeff says. “That never happened because the epoxy never cured—but we still have that ski here in the shop.”
For the next two years, the Thompsons made heaps of prototypes, learning from trial and error and a small internet forum of hobby ski builders. Jeff recalls watching, hitting pause, rewinding and re-watching old ski promo videos from industry giants, trying to glean any knowledge he could from behind-the-scenes tours of their factories.
At last, the brothers completed their first “Shaggy shape” ski, an all-mountain adventure ski built for the short, rugged hills of the Midwest.
Fast forward a few years to 2008: Jeff was in college at Michigan Technological University, his brother was living in Colorado, and the economic freefall brought the construction industry to a grinding halt.
Photo by Andy Wakeman
Their parents started talking about what it might look like if they went from building skis for a handful of people to becoming an actual business. “When I would come back for college breaks, I lived, ate and slept skis. That’s all we did. We made skis in my parent’s barn. Back then, there weren’t a lot of wide skis being made, especially not for hills in Michigan.”
The brothers saw potential. “We wanted to create something that could carve well through variable conditions, but still have the performance of an all-mountain ski,” Jeff adds. “We all had this dream, and we were very much committed to making it happen.”
In 2011, Jeff ’s folks sold their house downstate two days after putting it on the market, and suddenly, the family reached a critical decision point: they had 30 days to be out of the place where Shaggy’s was born. It was time to either go all in or let go of their goal of becoming the ski company that defines the hardy, joyful, make-it-work nature of Midwest skiers.
They knew one thing to be true: no one else was making a ski from locally sourced wood cores, designed to be versatile enough to handle ice and hold turns, and dynamic enough to hit bumps, jumps and powdery treelines. The OG Shaggy’s ski, the Ahmeek, hit every one of these points, and with the vibe and flair of a boutique ski at an affordable price (Shaggy’s entry point skis are still less than $800, and you can often find some of their skis on sale below $600).
In a split-second decision, the family took the leap and moved into an industrial park in Boyne City. Word-of-mouth fame and fans with a cult-like obsession soon followed.
Photo by Andy Wakeman
When they first opened in Boyne City, Shaggy’s began attracting people who wanted to come in and see what all the fuss was about. “We absolutely love this part of the work,” Jeff says. “Having a retail presence gave us the chance to talk to customers, to meet people and hear what they liked, what they thought we could do better, to talk about where we love to ski and how we ski and what it means to ski here in Michigan.”
Gradually, that interest forged a community of people who all love skiing. “We know folks who spend hard-earned money with us deserve the best, and also, that buying a Shaggy’s ski is the start of a relationship. We want to ride with our customers. We want their stories and their feedback… even if sometimes we’re Midwestern stubborn,” Jeff says with a laugh. “It’s a good thing; it’s how we’ve made it this far.”
With fewer than 10 full-time employees, Shaggy’s is tiny compared to most ski companies. The shop is still open to tours, and folks can see first-hand how wood cores are created from seven pieces of hardwood, with varying levels of natural flex puzzled together for skis designed to handle everything from backcountry and groomed corduroy to all-mountain or mixed terrain. There are human hands involved in every step of the process, from sourcing raw lumber to carving out signature wide-body shapes, to adding the carbon-reinforced fiberglass or lining up the graphic tops that make Shaggy’s skis collector’s items.
The Shaggy’s process only gets more refined as the years go by, as high-quality products with fair prices have created an undeniable market impact. As a result, their customer base has expanded from Michigan to the Midwest to nationwide.
“We’re a small fish in a big pond, but that doesn’t mean we have different standards. We want to be the small business that makes a positive impact on our community, and also, delivers the kind of product that people keep coming back to again and again.”
This mentality has brought Shaggy’s to the brink of another decision: Do they scale back and focus on producing more custom skis, or go bigger to compete with more traditional companies? Do they focus on remaining small and stable, or move toward another growth era and expand into new markets?
Photo by Andy Wakeman
“It’s an interesting place to be,” Jeff says. “We’ve bootstrapped everything so far. There’s never been a big bucket of money here, and we always have just enough to keep going, to keep trying to perfect what we do. I hope folks realize that we’re a small shop, and we’re proud to be small. A single sale still makes a difference for us. This is how we feed our families.”
The Shaggy’s team lives and dies by cash flow, reinvesting the money customers spend to build the best skis possible. Their metric for success: repeat buyers.
Part of this is attributable to quality, plain and simple. But part of the Shaggy’s recipe for magic is also in how the community is fostered and maintained. The team is made up of die-hard skiers, and they love nothing more than to rip turns with customers-turned-friends. Whether it’s on the annual Shaggy’s ski trip to the Upper Peninsula’s mythical low-fi ski utopia, Mount Bohemia, for a no-demo, no-work, all-fun event (once employees-only, now customers-included) or riding the chair with strangers at Boyne Mountain, talking skis and celebrating the sport is Jeff ’s business love language.
“One of the coolest things has to be hopping on a chairlift with someone I don’t know, and looking down to see they are riding on a pair of Shaggy’s. To be honest, I’m way too introverted to tell them who I am, but I always ask what they think, and it’s so fun to hear someone rave about how much they love Shaggy’s. It’s probably my favorite kind of moment on the hill now,” he says, before adding, “well, besides getting to ski with my daughter and watching her make it down the bunny hill by herself, or getting to carve turns on a lunch break with my wife.”
Jeff pauses for a long moment, and before he speaks it’s clear he’s thinking about the spirit of the real Shaggy—of those quiet, solo winter moments.
“Perfect, light, lake-effect snow in the trees of Mount Bohemia, when we’re making fresh tracks and the sun is shining and the air is sharp and crisp; there’s nothing beyond your skis and the hill. It’s the moment I think we all live for.”