WNDR Alpine Launches the Vital 100 Backcountry Ski

Introducing Algal Cast, Checkerspot’s next biomanufactured performance material

BERKELEY, Calif. & SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Checkerspot, Inc., a materials innovation company, announced today the launch of the Vital 100 ski by its outdoor consumer brand WNDR^® Alpine. The Vital 100 features Checkerspot’s new Algal Cast and Algal Hard Foam polyurethane materials designed to optimize backcountry ski performance.

The Vital 100 is a precision backcountry ski for technical, high alpine skiing. The new Algal Cast polyurethane is integrated into the Vital 100’s sidewalls. Applying this material creates a direct, epoxy-free bond to the ski’s core, and enables the construction of the ski’s sidewall to be a near zero waste process.

In addition, the Vital 100’s Algal Core application vertically laminates domestic aspen with stringers of the Algal Hard Foam to increase torsional stiffness at a lower weight and unprecedented stability for a ski in its class.

“As a ski designer, working closely with our molecular biologists and material scientists on the Vital 100 allowed us to eliminate petroleum-based ABS plastic sidewalls from the ski’s construction, and has allowed us to rethink the ski manufacturing process as a whole, resulting in significant waste reduction,” said Matt Sterbenz, GM of Checkerspot Wintersports and founder of WNDR Alpine.

“WNDR Alpine is an extension of Checkerspot’s lab. Innovating and creating new materials directly with product performance and the needs of the end-user top of mind provides us clear direction. We start with the question ‘how can we make products better?’” said Dr. Scott Franklin, CSO and co-founder of Checkerspot. “The development of our tunable Algal Cast polyurethane system demonstrates the integration of materials scientists, product design, and manufacturing to deliver products that meet or exceed the needs of the end user. In this case, skiers rely on this equipment in often challenging backcountry conditions. Bottom line, the materials have to perform,” Franklin continued.

“Historically, most product designers have been limited by the materials available to them from commodity-based suppliers. The Vital 100 is animating what is possible with biomanufactured materials enabled by biology and developed with end-use applications in mind,” said Charles Dimmler, CEO and co-founder of Checkerspot. “This is an example of how we are innovating performance materials designed for specific applications with use cases across a range of industries,” Dimmler says.

Checkerspot's materials innovation platform integrates biotechnology, materials science, and fabrication. The company's focus to date is on two classes of microalgae oil-derived material applications: polyurethanes and textile finishes.

Nature has evolved to produce novel molecular building blocks, like fatty acids from triglycerides, that are unexplored or under-utilized in materials science. They are overlooked because many of these materials cannot be supplied at large scale. Modern biomanufacturing (fermentation) processes enable Checkerspot to deliver these unique oils not previously accessible at commercial scale. Then through chemistry and materials science, Checkerspot and its partners prototype and iterate using applications development to design for targeted features and benefits that improve overall product performance.

About Checkerspot

Checkerspot designs performance materials at a molecular level. It does this by optimizing microbes to biomanufacture unique structural oils produced in nature, but not previously accessible at commercial scale. The company is currently commercializing two new materials: an algal hard foam and algal cast urethane engineered into skis and sold through the brand WNDR Alpine, as well as algal oil formulated into MiDori^® BioWick and sold in partnership with Beyond Surface Technologies to clothing brands worldwide. Checkerspot empowers leading product designers and innovators, including BST and WNDR Alpine, with new materials to develop new consumer and B2B applications for a post-petroleum future.

https://checkerspot.com/
http://wndr-alpine.com