The Pill Base Camp, winter edition: unconventional business camp

Pila, Sunday 6 February, 6.30am. From the car park to the clearing in front of the Trattoria dei Maestri, there is a bustle of people carrying folded gazebos, benches, tables, bags with boards or skis, some have stacked them like pellets to make them easier to transport. The snow on the ground is furrowed by a sort of grid, an imaginary village that in two hours will be full of equipment and people, it will be the first Base Camp organised by The Pill, which will last until the next day. When Denis Piccolo, the director, started talking to us about it, months ago, it seemed like a titanic thing to do and, no less, a total leap in the dark, a gamble: inviting hundreds of people to the first edition of an event is not a foregone conclusion. However, the response was overwhelming for a business-to-business event: 76 brands brought their stands to our Base Camp, including skis, snowboards, boots, bindings, goggles and glasses and products related to winter sports in general. They were joined by 230 representatives from 103 shops scattered throughout the region, from Umbria to Trentino, who had the opportunity to test the equipment of the most important brands in the world of all-mountain and freeride for the coming winter, concentrated in just a few square metres over two days, but also to get to know new ones. Alongside the best known and, if I may say so, most mainstream brands, there were also more niche brands, some of which were almost tailor made.

The heart of the two-day event was in fact the discussion on the product, tested by the dealers and then discussed in depth with the representatives of the brands and with us at the editorial office, who collected hundreds of interviews. Sustainability is an increasingly fundamental asset for outdoor companies, and among those who took part, a high percentage have equipped, or are in the process of equipping, their factories to be carbon neutral, and enormous progress has been made in terms of experimentation with new materials, which are increasingly green, but with high performance. The know-how of companies is focusing on sustainability, but also on making the experience of their customers increasingly satisfying: whether it is a question of skis or boards designed to be all mountain, or specific for mountaineering and freeriding, there are many innovations in the field for the 2023 season. Engineering gems at the service of winter sports, ingenious insights that will translate into a better riding experience, at all levels and for all types of terrain. The many discussions we have had as editors, both with dealers who have tested the products and with representatives of the various brands, will flow into one of the most important products of The Pill for us, the Winter Outdoor Guide, more than 400 pages full of product reviews from a technical, aesthetic and feeling point of view. You’ll have to wait until November to find out what’s new for 2023, but in the meantime we can tell you that the upcoming edition will be enriched by the contribution of the community gathered in Pila.

The most important aspect, and the one that made us as organisers happiest and proudest, is in fact the community aspect: The Pill Base Camp was an opportunity not only for retailers to test many different products, but also to talk to colleagues, from the same or other regions, to discuss with the brand their impressions after the test, to discuss with us what aspects are most requested by their customers and therefore important for us to report in the Outdoor Guide. The interviews collected amount to almost 400 and represent for us precious material for the drafting of our texts and to compare our feelings about the products with those of retailers and brands in order to give readers the most accurate and detailed descriptions possible. A collective effort that has brought, and will continue to bring, new life to our magazine, whose team put a lot of effort into these two days. Those of you who attended, whether brands or retailers, will have found Ludovica and Martina, tireless hosts who managed the registration of guests, the distribution of ski passes and the myriad of logistical issues that such an event inevitably requires, to welcome them. Alongside Denis, the deus ex machina of the entire two-day event, you will probably have come across Tommaso, who, together with the director, managed most of the attendance and logistics. Silvia and Camilla were there to take the photos you see, and I, Ilaria, together with Eva and Marta, hunted down everyone for interviews. A team effort that was a success, as a zero edition, as a first test to understand if and how to replicate in the future such a deployment of forces and sharing.

A pleasant interlude between the two days of testing was the evening we organised at The Place in Aosta, a meeting place for the local outdoor community, where the love of the mountains oozes from the walls, packed with high altitude shots. Here there was another opportunity to talk, to compare experiences made during the day and to go deeper into the issues that emerged during the day, but also to drink a beer, let’s make it two or three, together with what is a community passionate about both their work and the environment that hosts them. The Place is half club and half bike hub, and the environment lends itself to maximising our objective: to get to the bottom of what we are passionate about, the world of the outdoors.

Pila, Monday 7th February, 4.30pm. The sun has set on a clear, warm day. With the tiredness of almost 48 hours of work, making the reverse journey to the car park, with gazebos, board racks, skis on stilts and everything else that was useful for the camp, is a bit more tiring, but at least we do it with a smile on our faces. We succeeded, it was a challenge and that’s the main thing for us. The world of the outdoors and winter sports is built on challenges and we always like to invent new ones. We would like to thank all those who took part and embarked on this adventure with us, and those who will continue to do so in the future. Given the success of the first edition, we believe there will be others.

Stay Tuned.