Depending whether you've had a dig around faunaskis.com, you will have seen we have a ski, the Omni, which was meant to be coming out this year.

As a small, new, self-funded, core brand based in Europe, Covid has hit us hard, with the majority of people not travelling to go skiing, shops shut in lockdowns and a general lack of skiing going on. It's meant, among other effects, the limited deals we were working on with shops to pay for the Omni have fallen through, from shops not wanting to risk it on a new brand, to shops just completely shutting.

This has meant our production plan for the Omni has gone off the rails, as we haven't have the sales of other skis and shop pre-orders to make a full production run viable yet.

We want to get it back on track, and as we've had a bunch of interest in the Omni on here, we wanted to reach out to the community that started Fauna Skis and see if we can get enough people together initially for the short pre-production run of Omni skis, to get the tooling all produced and dialled in at the factory, and produce the first factory pairs.

The Omni has been designed & fully prototyped out (with the help of @Twig early on), we've settled on a shape, rocker profile and flex pattern, and have had early discussion with the factory on production. It's going to be a wider, slightly more directional, softer ski to the Alparka, weighing a similar amount (likely 1.8kg/ski @182cm) and it looks like this:

They would be built to the same duable, high standard we've come to expect from our factory, with screen printed designs, on laser cut veneers like you see on the Alparka; instead of the lighter, laser-etched designs on hand cut veneers on the prototypes, and they would all be individually numbered.

Based on the quote from the factory we would be looking for 600USD/500EUR/pair to pre-order a pair (with free shipping) from our pre-production run (other currencies are accepted). We already have some on board (like @BradFiAusNzCoCa) and really only need 3 more people to commit to pre-ordering a pair right now to do the 182cm, and 5 if to run the 173cm or 165cm too. It's likely going to be a couple months from order to us getting skis and then a couple days shipping to you. In that time I'd be sharing updates as we get them from the factory on their progress, shipment tracking, then individual ski order tracking.

So if you're interesting in owning one of the first pairs of our Omni skis, reply in the thread, drop us a message if you want to ask something off thread, and we can sort out any queries and commit to the order.

DISCLAIMER: I am not new on newschoolers, I've been on here over a decade, I've seen what has happened with pre-orders with another certain ski brand, leaving people without skis or their hard earned money back, and that really angered me, not only because its created dis-trust in our community of pre-orders, but its also damaged peoples ideas of small brands that a company could act in the way they did. I want to change that, and that starts with this.

What I am offering is payment for a product before it is produced with the promise, with receipts, that I will deliver it once it is produced. I don't want there to be any confusion around that and want to share as much information about the progress of it with you. I'll be dealing with it all (Alex Fleming, the Founder of Fauna Skis) through my personal fauna email, you can get me on FB, IG, on here, heck you can even whatsapp me through the site if you've a question. As I would do it myself, I'd encourage you to pay the pre-order invoice, through the same payment processor that we use on the website for orders (Stripe) by credit card, because of the extra payment protection you get.

Some fiiiine details of our factory Alparkas: