From the Funeral Home to East Boston, Parlor is Custom Skiing to the Core

You wouldnt expect one of New Englands latest and most intriguing skiing ventures to hail from East Boston, where skiers and riders would normally flock only to catch a flight to winter playgrounds in the Rocky and Sierra Mountains.

Yet it is here, just past Logan Airport and along the Chelsea River, tucked into a small space located at the rear of a Planet Fitness along Route 1A, where Parlor, a custom ski building company founded by a trio of locals, has set up its burgeoning alpine business, complete with in-shop canine mascots, a fresh case of Narragansett in the corner of the workroom, and an ingrained passion for creating and enhancing customizable skiing experiences.

Born in a Cambridge funeral home six years ago, Parlor (www.parlorskis.com) is the brainchild of three former classmates and ski team members at Williams College, who honed their skills for racing and construction into a business quite unique to New England. By creating skis specific to each customers needs, Parlor hopes to make its name as a local outlet in a boutique ski market that, to this point, had been mostly focused entirely in the western U.S.

We saw an opportunity in New England to become New Englands custom ski builder, co-founder Mark Wallace said. There are a lot of companies out west and there are a few smaller companies out here, but nobody is really focusing on the terrain that we have here and also really being able to build a manufacturing process around building skis to order and customizing skis to order for New England.

Unlike some other custom ski companies, Parlor doesnt outsource its work, which is all done on premises in East Boston, from the shaping of the aspen or maple wooden cores, to feeding the press (the process of curing the epoxy between every layer of the ski). Its a hands-on process fueled by joint passions for skiing and building that instills versatility into every ski they create.

Its very unique to New England, that was also one of the things that inspired it, co-founder Jason Epstein said. We just kind of saw a void here and it seemed like a good opportunity to offer that product and that same kind of culture around it, a custom ski company, but something that really speaks directly to New Englanders.

The idea started as many tend to - over a couple beers, when Epstein tried to convince Wallace that it was possible to make high-quality, small-batch skis with a focus on the region in which they were being manufactured. In New England, that particularly meant a ski that could handle the icy, cruddy, and typically unpredictable conditions, but one that could also hold its own in deeper powder found in Colorado and Utah.

It really just started as a hobby, Epstein said. Through our skiing experiences, we just have a really good idea of what kinds of skis we like and how different ski designs work. The three of us all had a passion for hands-on projects, we all worked in the construction development industry in different ways, so we just have an eye and a passion for design.

Wallace, who spent some time after graduation skiing competitively on the NorAm circuit, was sold, and a couple days later, he and Epstein were at Home Depot with the intent of creating their initial molds in Epsteins Cambridge basement. Soon, thereafter, the old funeral home opened up, and a name was born.

There was a little bit of back-and-forth around the name, because we wanted something that represented us being a New England ski brand, Wallace said. The fact that we were in a parlor, and a parlor has a sort of homey feeling and a community feeling, that tied in with the interest story of it being a funeral parlor. That sort of ended up resonating for us.

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From the Funeral Home to East Boston, Parlor is Custom Skiing to the Core