Style_ April 01, 2021

18 Style | Feature
You can imagine it in your mind as Alex Herbert
describes the scene. His three-year-old face
forlornly pressed up to the back of the car window
as his parents drove away from the snow. They were
in Europe, Alex can’t remember exactly where, but
he does remember the feeling that came with his first
experience with snow.
“I was so amazed by it [the snow]. We didn’t have
any gear with us or anything, so I slid around on my
tummy and on my back. It was probably only a really
small patch of snow and seeing it through kids’ eyes
made it bigger, but I think that’s what triggered my
desire to chase the snow. I remember it having a
profound effect on me – when we were driving away
I was looking out the window back at it,” he chuckles
from his Lyttelton home.
And he has turned it into one heck of a relationship.
Alex is the owner and creator behind Kingswood Skis,
where you won’t get a factory-created pair of skis, but
custom fat skis created by Alex’s own hands.
It was disappointment as an 18-year-old that actually
sent him into the industry of ski repairs and then ski
creation. After spending time each year in Austria,
where his mum Heidi Herbert is from, Alex was more
than a bit handy on the old skis. In Austria, he says,
skiing is the national sport, with people popping out in
their lunch break to have a play. In spite of this, when
Alex went to get a coveted gig as a ski instructor at
Thredbo, a ski and resort village in Australia, he didn’t
make the grade. So, he had to do something – it was
either washing dishes or ski repair.
He chose the latter and it turns out that things really
do happen for a reason.
“It was a pivotal point in my life. I really got into ski
repair and learned that I’m better using my hands,”
he says.
Alex worked in Austria, Canada and Australia,
honing and developing his skills. He did insurance
work; damaged snowboards would be replaced with
new boards. But this gave him an opportunity to
develop his repair skills.
“Even if it was pretty minor, they’d throw it in the
bin. So, I started taking it out of the bin and fixing it
up,” he says.
“It was really good gear, so I’d ride on it. When I left,
I just gave it all back.”
While the pinnacle of tuning and repair work is
considered to be out on the competitive circuit with
professional teams, that life didn’t appeal to Alex. He
wanted something different and so went about quietly
developing his own way of doing things, evolving his
skills with what he learned on the way.
Fast forward to 1996, when Alex was competing
in the World Heli Challenge in Wānaka and was a
touch frustrated at how the United States team was
“blitzing” his team on their “fat skis” – a wider ski than
New Zealanders had at the time.
Alex couldn’t find fat skis anywhere and wholesalers
told him there wasn’t a market for them in New
Zealand. So in the summer of 2002, he sourced the
material to make a pair. Then, it was off to the Broken
River skifield to test them.
ABOVE & OPPOSITE: The tools of the trade. Each pair of Kingswood Skis takes about 10 hours to make,
with Alex at the helm for most of the process.