Last February at the Pico Ski Club's silent auction, an annual fundraiser for one of the country's oldest ski clubs, a pair of bright green and blue argyle-pattern goggles were a hot item - more so than the skis or restaurant gift certificates that were also auctioned.

The goggles featured the name Shred in big letters on the strap, and the information card listed them as the Nastify Redux Green model.

Although they clash with almost everything - from jackets to speedsuits - that's the point. The goggles are bright. They stand out. They're edgy. And in the alpine ski-racing world, especially among kids, they are a must-have.

Why? Because not only does 2006 Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety wear Shred goggles, he owns the company.

While many athletes wait until after they have retired from their sport to start a business venture, 24-year-old Ligety is at the peak of his ski-racing career - and still striving to win more races and titles. At the 2010 Olympics, he will be favored to win at least one medal, and in the not-too-far future, he wants to add a World Cup overall crystal globe to his trophy cabinet. He already won the overall World Cup giant slalom crystal globe.

As Shred grows, Ligety seems to be taking the same approach to business that he does to ski racing. While some skiers' slalom and giant slalom runs are a series of linked recoveries, Ligety is usually a model of precision and balance. And thanks to a fortuitous friendship with an Italian engineer/businessman named Carlo Salmini, Ligety is balancing the dual roles of entrepreneur and ski champion with equal success.

The story of Shred starts back in 2005 when Ligety first made the U.S. Ski Team. With short blond hair, big blue eyes, and a constant smile, Ligety looked like the classic all-American kid. That first year on the team, without many sponsors to help him pay his way, he put a sticker on the front of his ski helmet that said "Mom & Dad."

Ligety's parents, Bill Ligety and Cyndi Sharp, are realtors in Park City, Utah.

Back then, he wore Uvex goggles. But they weren't just any Uvex goggles. According to former Uvex rep Dave Peszek, Uvex allowed their top international racers to have custom goggles. U.S. skiers noticed the customized goggles and started bugging Peszek to get them their own designs. He obliged, but only if they asked nicely.

"Ted came to me and said he wanted to do something different, to stand out," recalls Peszek. "It was during the fashion craze of bringing back the 'preppy' colors, and he said he wanted lime green and hot pink."

Pink and green?

"I thought it was funny and something different," explains Ligety, who has let his boy-next-door haircut grow shaggy. "I've always been into the 80s retro look as well."

An autobody painter in St. Johnsbury, Vt., airbrushed the Uvex frames, and the neon goggles made it easy to distinguish Ligety on course.

"When I was wearing them, I was always getting email from people asking where to get them and what they were," remembers Ligety.

At the Torino Olympics, Peszek carried backups of both the pink and green goggles-"since one never knew what color he would rock that day," says Pez. (Ligety "rocked" his pink goggles to gold.)

But Ligety's contract with Uvex expired after the 2006 season, and according to Peszek, negotiations to extend it fell through. Ligety was not impressed by most of the available goggle designs on the market, so by summer, the Olympic champion was still without a goggle sponsor.

"I wanted something that was cool for racing but was also cool for free skiing," explains Ligety. "There was nothing really out there that met those two worlds."

Then one day that summer, Ligety was on a mountain bike ride in Park City with his friend Carlo Salmini. An engineer, Salmini owns the Italian company Slytech, which makes the protective body armor for ski racing and snowboarding. Ligety mentioned to Salmini that he was thinking of starting his own goggle company. With his Olympic gold medal making him more of a household name, at least in the ski world, the timing seemed right.

"Carlo was super into it," Ligety remembers. "He had all the manufacturing connections in Italy, so it just went from there."

Little did Ligety know that Salmini was already thinking about adding goggles to Slytech's line and had met a goggle manufacturer the previous winter at a trade show.

Back in Italy, Salmini contacted the goggle manufacturer and worked on a frame design. After testing the goggles himself and making a few adjustments, he shipped them to Ligety, who was on his way to train in Chile.

"He liked them, so we decided to start," says Salmini. "That was probably September 10, and the first World Cup races were October 25. So it was a race against time. We had to design the goggles, pick the colors, make the brand image, do the marketing, everything in a month and a half."

The company name was easy. Shred is Ligety's nickname, given to him by a ski coach long ago-"because it rhymes with Ted, I get after it on skis, and I was fearless as a little kid," Ligety says.

Ligety's younger brother, Charley, came up with the logo-a "shredded" mountain. Charley graduated from Dartmouth College in June.

Ligety and Salmini held a press conference at the World Cup opener in October and sold their first batch of goggles the day before Christmas.

When asked what makes Shred goggles stand apart from the competition, Salmini says that most goggle companies are trying to be different, but most have neglected the basics: field of view and quality of the lens.

"That's what we focused on from the beginning," he says. "It was the first time probably that a racer goggle was designed to perform and to look good at the same time."

Salmini also says Shred benefits from Ligety's feedback. "We have [one of] the best giant slalom skiers in the world developing and testing them," he says. "He is somebody who really needs the best vision."

At first, Shred took much of Ligety's time and focus. The company was headquartered in his Park City home, and the Olympic gold medalist and his friends did much of the distribution - taping up cardboard boxes and shipping them out. Ligety also ran the website and an online store.

Now Shred's headquarters are in Venice, Italy, and Salmini splits his time between running Slytech and Shred. He handles the manufacturing end of the business and looks for new materials and lenses that will improve the goggles. For example, the Omnibot Eco has a strap made from a recycled mountain bike tire tube.

This has relieved Ligety of much of the day-to-day chores and allowed him to focus on designing. And training.

Although Ligety does travel to the factories and trade shows when he's in Europe, he has managed to stay focused on ski racing. Since Shred launched in September 2006, Ligety has earned 12 World Cup medals (three of them gold), the overall giant slalom World Cup title (2008), and a bronze medal at the 2009 World Championships.

"It's been a good distraction," Ligety says of his business. "It would suck to have to go the gym, and that's your life. It's nice to have this secondary option."

With input from his friends and teammates - like 2006 Olympian Resi Stiegler - Ligety comes up with most of the goggle designs and color schemes.

"We look around, see what we think is cool, even from outside the sport," says Ligety. "We try to get inspiration from anything and anywhere."

Like those pink Uvex goggles, he often thinks retro - which for a 24-year-old, is the 1980s. For Shred's Omnibot 80s goggles, which debut this season, he took a cue from the "old-school racing car look."

The Omnibot 80s frames are flat on the bottom, recalling the low, angular, square-nosed-look of the Lamborghini Countach.

"His design ideas are crazy, but all the kids love them," says Salmini. "His new ideas will be very, very popular."

Exactly how popular Shred goggles are neither Ligety nor Salmini will say. Growth has been exponential, they say - from the first batch of 2,000 goggles that they sold during the 2007 winter season.

"Every year it's been a huge progression for us," says Ligety.

They have also expanded the Shred line to include helmets and sunglasses. In the U.S., Shred will now sell three helmet models, including one for racing called the Brain Bucket, with color models labeled Nastify Pink, Nastify Green, The Schwarz (black and green), and Money Shot (white and pink).

And they aren't just a U.S. and Italian company. Shred products are sold in 23 countries, including Lebanon - anywhere there's snow, says Ligety.

"In Korea, we're solely [known as] a snowboard company," says Ligety, then laughs.

But this has been one of their goals from the start.

"We don't want to be the ski company," explains Salmini. "We don't want to be the snowboard company. We want to be the snow company."

Of the 15 "shredders" (sponsored athletes) listed on Shred's website, only two - Ligety and Stiegler - are alpine racers. The rest are freeriders, skiercross competitors, and snowboarders, including Swiss snowboarding legend, Romain De Marchi, who signed on as a Shred athlete on July 22, 2009.

In the U.S., about 80 percent of Shred's market so far is youth, says Greg Hadley, whose company Vermont Sport Sales Agency facilitates sales of Shred products in the U.S.

"There's a lot of hype within the brand because of Ted," Hadley says. "And it's a very exciting-looking brand."

"Among racers, it's the fastest growing product right now," adds Barry Levinson, owner of Ski Racing Development, a race-product shop in Vail, Colo., with a catalogue and online presence.

Hadley says more and more adults are starting to buy Shred goggles, perhaps because the company has broadened the color pallet to include tones that don't include the word "nastify" in the description. The Money Shot goggle and helmet are white, The Schwarz black.

But they are still bold, with Shred written in purple and green on the straps, and with the helmets, a neon-colored lining frames the wearer's face.

Asked if he has a favorite model, Ligety says he wears all of them throughout the season. On the World Cup tour, he wore the white Money Shot goggles and matching white Brain Bucket in one race, the Nastify Redux Green goggles and a matching Nastify Green helmet in another.

But now his favorites are the race-car-looking Omnibots - the orange ones with the blue strap and orange mirror lens. In the catalog, they are called Papaya.

At the Whistler Olympic venue next February, they will be hard to miss.

Tags: Ted Ligety, US Ski and Snowboard, Vancouver 2010, Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games