Word: rossignol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Throughout her years of skiing, St. John has received financial backing and moral encouragement from the National Brotherhood of Skiers, a coalition of Black skiing clubs. In addition, she regularly receives skis from the Rossignol company, which gives away mismatched skis to amputees...
Opening day! In front of the brick dormitory, the dust-streaked family car lurches to a halt with its load of indispensable college supplies: one Sony stereo with headphones, two gooseneck lamps, five pairs of blue jeans, two down parkas (one old, one new), one pair of Rossignol skis ... and one nervous freshman wondering whether anybody will like him. The older students have an easier time of it, needing only to unpack what they left in storage over the summer: more lamps, more blue jeans, boots, bicycles, one unused thesaurus donated by an out-of-date uncle .. . And now, from...
...past decade, Rossignol's capacity has risen twentyfold, to 2 million skis a year of wood, metal, plastic and fiber-glass foam. Because cross-country skis are booming, Boix-Vives plans to double capacity in that department this year to 350,000 skis. But his strategy involves more than expansion of capacity. As volume grew in the mid-'60s, the company's increased productivity enabled Boix-Vives to adopt a policy of, as he puts it, "aggressive pricing"; Rossignol prices stayed completely stable from 1964 all the way to 1972. Today Rossignol produces eight principal lines...
Also crucial to Rossignol's success was Boix-Vives's decision to go into multinational manufacturing. Says he: "It was better to produce on location abroad so that we could become accepted. It also gave us a better knowledge of local markets." Indeed, it was the company's Vermont plant that developed a compact ski suitable for New England's thickly wooded hills; the ski has also become a hit in parts of France, Austria and Germany...
...Rossignol's 3,000 employees, 100 work full time in research and development, a proportion unique among ski makers. In their search for the "ultimate ski," the designers, together with West Germany's Bayer AG, are exploring the properties of polyurethane and compressed air. Boix-Vives is also planning a whole new product line. A dedicated schusser, he was inspired by an American study showing that 80% of his fellow skiers also play tennis. So he plans to spend $1.3 million to get Rossignol racquets into production. The racquets will be a molded mix of metal and plastic...