We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ara Nazarian. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ara below.

Ara, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Verispellis is a play on words or Latin Versipellis, meaning werewolf or shapeshifter, given the nature of our skis and snowboards on how they change their behavior on command.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a Biomedical Scientist in the Greater Boston area. My training is in mechanical and biomedical engineering. Ken, known as KROD, is an Orthopedic surgeon and engineer specializing in trauma at the same institution in Boston. Both passionate skiers, we came up with the idea to utilize Nitinol to create a pair of “shape-shifting” skis or snowboards. Our final design keeps the same shape of the ski but changes the material properties, stiffness rocker and vibration profile of the skis. We used their experience with Nitinol from our medical research projects to create arguably the most technologically advanced pair of skis and snowboards around.

Ken and I had thought about Nitinol for some of our biomedical projects, and one day we asked ourselves, why can’t we use it in skis to allow us to modulate the performance of our skis? Being east coast skiers, where we ski on a variety of snow on the same day at the same mountain, we figured we’d consolidate a quiver into a single pair of skis that could handle different conditions by responding to the snow and weather conditions. And as they say, the rest is history, and Verispellis was born. The idea was conceived on Mount Sunapee in NH, where many bouts of ambient, snow, and ski temperatures were recorded over different weather conditions. Verispellis was born in Boston, first in our computers, where we designed and simulated skiing on different types of snow at different skiing conditions and carving angles, using finite element (FE) modeling, followed by building our first prototype, testing, and repeating this process to finalize and optimize all design components of our product. Since then, we have designed and built several prototypes, learning more each time and adjusting toward building the best pair of skis we can. We believe our latest iteration is just that, as we have achieved optimal performance, with the least amount of material, in an easy to manufacture format.

How’d you meet your business partner?

KROD and I “grew up” in the same academic setting, going back 24 years. We both had the same mentor, one of us as a graduate student and the other as a medical student. Neither one of us really left the institution, having started as students and working our way to senior positions at the moment. So, we have been close friends and colleagues for many years and have worked together on countless projects as work, addressing unmet medical needs in musculoskeletal health. We have similar hobbies and enjoy working together.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Our work relies predominantly on grant funding from governmental sources. This makes for both challenging and exciting times, testing your resilience regularly. We spend months and years researching a topic or unmet need and go through the trials and tribulations to generate good data and then spend additional several months devising, writing, and wordsmithing a grant proposal, which then disappears into the grant review world and raises its head a few months down the line, all battered and bruised or triumphant. Once you do this a few times in the year, where your entire operations depend on the success of these cycles, you either become even more determined and resilient or leave the game. There is no alternative path. we carry this mentality to all our endeavors, including our skis and snowboards. Nothing is guaranteed to succeed or work when you deal with innovation and new concepts. Some concepts might sound amazing but fall flat upon inquiry, while other less exciting ones, at first, may surprise you with favorable results. Our ski/snowboard concept has been one of these cases where we had an exciting idea that also worked. However, this was not an easy or straightforward path. while most of the work progressed well at each design and prototyping phase, we hit a different problem that challenged us at every phase. Our latest round of prototyping has been no different, where something that had never been an issue became a significant source of stress for us. But, we persevered and worked on the problem from every possible angle until we found an excellent solution that allowed us to move forward.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.verispellis.com
• Instagram: Verispellis
• Facebook: Verispellis

Image Credits
All images and renderings property of Verispellis Skis + Snowboards