By admin 
How do you keep your skis together when carrying them? Odds are you probably use a ski strap. Turns out, that same strap can be used for a million other things. In fact, I’ve seen these small elastic straps in the wildest places, from literally holding small airplanes together in the Alaskan bush, to industrial uses all over the world. But how much do you know about the history of the ski strap?
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Now often imitated, the ski strap as we know it today first came to be in 1982 in the Voile factory in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was originally developed as a simple flexible tension strap as part of the brand’s Snake Skin backcountry ski climbing system. At the time, it was never intended to become its own product, but very soon, that is exactly what happened.
Footwear manufacturer Merrell first incorporated it as a toe strap on their Super Comp telemark boot. Soon after, customers began asking Voile to sell the strap as a standalone product, and in 1984 it reached shelves as “The Voile Strap.” It’s still manufactured in Utah today.
More than 40 years later, the basic design has become ubiquitous enough that an entire class of products follows a similar design. “You don’t get copied this often unless the idea works,” says Voile Marketing Director Eric Reed in a press release. “What started as one small part of another product became something people use for just about everything.”
The company has spent more than 40 years developing its proprietary material formulation, dimensions, hole geometry, buckle systems, tooling, molding processes, weather resistance, and manufacturing consistency. There’s just something about how a Voile strap stretches to grip whatever it’s strapped around. “Forty years of R&D doesn’t necessarily make a product more complicated,” Reed says. “In our case, it helped us make a simple product better.”
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With so many dupes on the market, Voile has encountered products customers believed were genuine Voile Straps, including straps presented to the company for warranty support. That issue prompted the company’s latest update.
As of 2026, every new Voile Strap now carries a permanently molded Voile logo, along with the strap’s length in both inches and centimeters. The mark remains even on co-branded Voile Straps carrying another company’s artwork. It’s a simple update, but aims to represent more than just branding. To them, it identifies a product manufactured under the company’s own material, tooling, molding, hardware, and quality-control standards.
“Keeping production close gives us control over the quality,” Reed says. “The material, the tooling, the process; we don’t want to hand any of that off and risk unseen changes to something we’ve spent so much effort dialing in.”
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This story was originally published October 13, 2026 at 4:53 AM.