Who We Are in 2026

You might have noticed we look quite renewed around here: New logo, new website, a new way of saying things. There's no better time to reintroduce ourselves. So, who is Hagan in 2026?

The short answer hasn't changed in a hundred years. We make gear for ski touring, the simple act of earning your turns. That looks different from one skier to the next. We build skis for people chasing casual powder laps and for people climbing and crossing whole mountain ranges. Either way, our equipment is for those who travel over snow under their own power. That's the whole business. Not a little of everything for everyone, it's all one pursuit, built carefully, since 1924.

That focus is the thing that sets us apart. Plenty of brands make skis, but few of those skis are truly built to go up a mountain as well as down it. Fewer still have spent a century making only the gear that gets you up and back down again: skis, bindings, skins, boots, poles, and nothing that isn't in service of that. When you do one thing for that long, you get the details right, because the details are all there is.

So let's start where it started.

In 1924, in the small Austrian village of Antiesenhofen, two brothers, Franz and Hans Hager, built wagon wheels. It was good work, but they could see where the world was headed: the horse-drawn wagon was on its way out, and the automobile was on its way in. So, they placed a bet on a different kind of movement. They turned the workshop toward toboggans and skis, and named the new venture with a word stitched from their own: Hager, plus the first letters of Antiesenhofen. Hagan.

The first skis were solid ash cut from slats, boiled in hot water, and bent over heated iron molds, the ski technology of the day. By 1925 they were selling five hundred pairs a year. We bring up the wagon wheels for a reason. Years later, when ski touring became fashionable and every big brand rushed to bolt on a touring line, we liked to say we hadn't jumped on the bandwagon. We built that wagon. Turns out that was more literally true than we ever let on.

What followed was a hundred years of the same instinct: adapt the craft, never abandon it. The founder's daughter, Hermine, carried the company forward with her husband Ludwig Siegesleuthner. They transitioned from solid wood to layered sandwich construction, adding fiberglass and aluminum, and sending the first Hagan skis abroad. Their son Franz took it further, earning Hagan a name for ski design that still has a cult following in Austria today.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the whole ski industry fell off a cliff, Austria's included, Hagan's included. Plenty of century-old names didn't make it out of that decade. Hagan made a decision that would come to define everything since: instead of trying to be a little of everything, it closed the old factory, relaunched, and committed entirely to the backcountry, ski touring, and only ski touring. Skis first, then bindings, then skins, then boots.

That's the part we sit with. The focus you see today wasn't a marketing angle dreamed up in a meeting. It was how the Hagan brand survived. Only afterward did it become who the brand is.

A hundred years on, Hagan reached its centennial and passed into a new chapter, new Austrian stewardship, the same obsession with the craft, still made largely in Austria, still built for one thing. The people carrying it forward bought in precisely because they believe in what a century of focus built.

One thing worth clearing up, since we're doing introductions. Hagan Ski USA is an independently owned subsidiary — your North American crew — acting as the distributor for Hagan across the U.S. and Canada, working hand in hand with our friends in Austria. We're not a faceless import: we're a small team on this side of the Atlantic who ski this gear, answer your emails, and know the terrain you're asking about and what skis work best for your snowpack. Hagan runs the same way elsewhere in the world, with dedicated distributors in places such as Norway and Chile. Austrian roots, local hands. 

Over the coming weeks we'll tell the rest of the story properly: what we actually make and why the small details matter, who ski touring is really for (the answer is more people than you'd think), and the people who ride with us. Consider this the opening chapter.

But if you take one thing from it, take this. We've spent a hundred years getting one thing right, and we're not about to start doing everything else. New look. Same obsession.