Man of Many Masks: An Interview with Julian Carr

With college out of the way, Carr was free to travel and focus on creating a career out of his passion. “Just really understanding the business sense of it enabled me to make a career out of something I loved,” he says. Carr’s degree in economics helped him realize his potential value to ski companies and, at age 22, he finally went pro. Passion and business sense can only get you so far—talent and skill are what really pushed Carr into the pro spotlight.
   
In his early days, Carr competed in slopestyle competitions: “When I very first started getting into skiing, I tried a few of them. I had my big mountain skis and I’d be trying fakie tricks. That’s when … just doing a fakie 180 was unheard of,” he says. “I found I didn’t love [slopestyle] nearly as much as I loved powder and cliffs,” he says. Since finding his passion in big mountain skiing, Carr has set two world records for cliff drops.
   
Carr says cliffs were a natural progression of his skiing for him. “It wasn’t all of a sudden one day I was like, ‘I’m going to go out and jump a gigantic cliff and it’s going to be a world record,’” he says. Starting small, five or ten feet, Carr worked his way up to cliffs that tower hundreds of feet in the air. He currently holds two world records. One for the highest cliff with an invert: He threw a front flip off of a 210-foot cliff in Switzerland in 2006. The other, he did right here at home—dropping a 140-foot cliff at Snowbird during the 2006 U.S. Freeskiing Nationals, earning him the record for highest cliff in a competition. Between traveling, shooting photos and blowing up the Guinness Book of World Records, Carr still finds time to maintain his business, Discrete Headwear.
   
While Carr loves skiing, he realizes that a career as a professional skier is fleeting. “I knew that my shelf life was ultimately limited as an athlete, and I loved skiing enough that I wanted to create something so I could still exist in it,” he says. His company gives him a tie to the ski industry that isn’t reliant on the continued existence of the cartilage in his knees. Besides that, Carr also sees it as a creative outlet. “Having something like Discrete … still utilizes all of the aspects of my brain that [are] non-skiing and [gives me] the ability to be an entrepreneur,” he says.
   
Even though they matured together, he says his skiing career has definitely helped him build his company. “I think that being a pro skier really helped me get platforms of exposure for my company. All the relationships I had with other athletes that were top level—they were friends with me so they were happy to support the brand,” he says. Getting pros to rock your gear is the best recipe for success in this business, and that’s exactly how Carr went about it. In addition to being homies with all the best athletes, Carr’s relationships with the media also helped him achieve success.
   
Balancing a life with multiple careers is no easy task, but Carr seems to manage it without completely losing his shit—and that takes talent. “From May until January, I’m pretty much business man in Utah. So December and January I can still be here shooting photos and skiing everyday. Then, after the trade shows are done in January, I can travel and do my whole skiing-career side of things,” he says. Most of us would be content to hone a single talent, but Carr isn’t the type to settle for just one. He is a gifted skier and businessman, and it doesn’t look like he plans on dropping either of those anytime soon.