The best season in ten years in Europe - recessions mean shorter lift queues and more snow for the rest of us. New team riders, new friends and more stories at the bar. Phone calls from the New York Times and Gene Simmons' attorney during SIA result in our first collaboration with Kiss with the graphics for the 09/10 Thirteens.

Rest in Peace Shane - your ideas and passion for skiing inspired us all.

Keeping it real back in the wind and rain of Aussie ski resorts... Counting down the days till winter again...

One step closer to the dream. New distributors, an amazing factory producing the best quality stock we've ever seen. New products, rocker and early-rise, flat-camber. New staff, new drive, new opportunities and challenges. Laps of Tortin and the Attelas couloirs in ‘Verbs'. Two weeks filming with Rage in Bralorne with our North American team.

Interpol and The National at Montreux Jazz Festival. Bungle, artist Craig Douglas, photographer Tero Repo and a couple of thousand friends, team riders and kids taking handfuls of stickers in two days at Zurich's legendary Freestyle.ch festival down by the lake.

Hours in the factory spent quality checking and finishing our 08/09 stock. 09/10 ideas on the drawing board and the molds taking shape as we speak.

One crazy, exciting week in Munich at ISPO. NSIA in Quebec. Ross driving round trips of 1000km from Fernie to Whistler with a car full of demo skis. Resort parking lots. Ex-IFSA World Champion Ryan Oakden and Shane Carmichael getting the timing right and stepping up to join us. Rage Films rider Mark Dvorak coming out of nowhere and blowing us all away.

Manning the booth at a trade show in Switzerland, Alex called me from the IFSA World Tour Finals in Tignes, France. Good friend and team rider Neal Valiton had fallen in his run and didn't get up again, shock, panic, walking around in circles and not being able to do anything at all about it. Two steps forward, one great leap back.

Moving year round to Verbier, Switzerland. A chance encounter with an American living in London called Alex Hoye gave the drive and desire to get the lumbering beast some legs and back on track.

Partnerships with the Verbier Ride event series. Judging big mountain comps for the first time. Tom Dunbar's 9-score line in the final of the Verbier Ride Big Mountain. Ross + Martha interviewed on Eurosport. Interviews with me for Biglines.com and Dark Summer magazine.

Two weeks in Biarritz cramming a solid business plan together with Alex who'd come on board as a partner. Learning to surf in France and Portugal when I was born an hour from Bells Beach, home of Quiksilver, Billabong et al,the price you pay for a life in the mountains. Tequila at 3am, waking up on the beach at 7am.

More testing, slow progress, more credit card debt, ski tests, missed appointments and day jobs and reality. Nights designing t-shirts, stickers and building the prototypes for a complete range of freeride and freestyle skis, Nothing But Fat Twins, THOSE stickers, New team members Ben (Bungle) Hawker (UK), Evan Wilcox and Kyle Johnson (CAN) and Dustin Hendricks (USA) supporting us through thick and thin.

Back in France, a makeshift factory in an old converted cowshed, smuggling prototypes for our friends across the border to Switzerland in the back of a car on Christmas Eve. Testing, modifying, testing some more.

The birth of Newschoolers.com, skipass.fr, freeride.se and a new way to communicate to our friends around the world. Quebec, Stockholm, London, Les Arcs, Jackson Hole, Wanaka NZ. The word was spreading.

A product design degree. 10 seasons in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France and Switzerland. Countless hours in studio apartments with masking tape, stencils and spray cans and no ventilation customising skis and boards for friends.

Volkl G4s, Explosivs, Dynastar Arno Adams, K2 Big Kahunas, Nordica Beasts and the dreaded Sally Pocket Noodle, pouring over Powder and Freeze and Skieur magazine's Buyers Guides looking for THE PERFECT SKI

A name that came by itself in the half-awake, half-asleep state between the mattress and the first espresso, 'Faction'. Me, Ross Janzen and Martha Burley stuck in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia plotting and scheming about an idea to build the perfect ski and do things right, by ourselves.

Tony McWilliam

Co-founder and Director

The Faction Collective

Verbier, Switzerland