Marker

Marker was founded in 1952 in Garmisch, Germany, by Hannes Marker, a ski instructor who had watched students suffer repeated injuries from bindings that failed to release in a fall. His first product, the Duplex, was the world's first ski binding with a releasing toe and debuted at the 1952 sporting goods trade fair in Wiesbaden on a display of three square meters and a single chair; it went on to sell more than five million units. The Simplex toe binding followed in 1953. Marker bindings reached the Olympic podium in 1956, when Ossi Reichert won gold wearing them, and the company later introduced the Telemat and Rotamat models with automatic heel mechanisms in the 1960s. In 1983, Marker bindings won eight of ten World Cup alpine skiing titles that season. The company's freeride-specific Duke binding, its first built for that discipline, launched in 2007, followed by the Griffon and other models in the same category, with the Duke PT arriving in 2020 as a combined freeride-and-touring hybrid binding.