Aztech Mountain: A Ski Brand With ‘If You Know, You Know’ Mountain Cred

If anyone knows a great ski jacket, it’s Bode Miller. The professional skier has tested countless ski brands over an 18-year career spanning five Winter Olympics, six Olympic medals and 33 World Cup wins. But in 2015, while training in Portillo, Chile, he took a run in the Nuke Suit jacket by Aztech Mountain, a ski label founded by the Aspen, Colo., couple Heifara Rutgers and David Roth. He was stopped … well, in his tracks.

“I could tell it was highly developed because of the founders’ connection to Aspen,” Mr. Miller said. “They had clearly spent a lot of time on the mountain and understood the technical aspects of fabric and design.”

Mr. Miller admired the jacket’s fit, breathability and baffling for better heat circulation and movement. He appreciated its well-placed pockets, open cuffs for easy glove wear — and undeniable cool.

He later met with Mr. Rutgers and Mr. Roth, and the three men teamed up, with Mr. Miller serving as Aztech Mountain’s chief innovation officer and consulting on a few styles, like the Hayden 3L Shell Jacket and Shell Pant. He was also the face of the brand for three years.

“To this day, I think that jacket is, if not the best, then in a very small group of the best ski jackets I’ve ever skied in,” Mr. Miller said.

Ten years later, Aztech Mountain remains an Aspen staple, tailored for those who would rather chase first tracks off the Silver Queen gondola than champagne showers at the Cloud Nine bistro. In a category of over-the-top glitz and logo-heavy excess, where luxury ski labels have turned the slopes into a runway, Aztech Mountain prioritizes performance and precision.

Instead of flashy branding, its clothing is defined by thoughtful details: mountain-shaped zippers, streamlined silhouettes and the right hit of neon and print. It’s a label recognized through knowing nods in the gondola, a quiet badge of insider status.

Aztech Mountain’s fusion of fashion and function is not by accident. Mr. Rutgers, who leads design, merchandising and creative, spent much of his career at Marc Jacobs. In 2013, he started working on a new kind of jacket — originally for Barneys New York — and enlisted a team of friends and former Jacobs designers to bring it to life.

“I had experienced fashion at the highest level, and I was seeing the growth of Moncler and Canada Goose,” said Mr. Rutgers, who, with Mr. Roth and their four-year-old daughter, Liv, splits time between Aspen and TriBeCa, home of the brand’s only stand-alone store.

For Mr. Rutgers, pursuing skiwear was an obvious choice. His father moved his family to Aspen in 1974 and started teaching skiing. Mr. Rutgers grew up ski racing and watching downhill competitions from his perch near Ruthie’s, the lunch hut at Ajax Mountain. His favorite run is Aztec, for which the brand is named. Some early Aztech styles featured vintage photos sourced from the Aspen Historical Society.

“I always say Aspen is our muse,” Mr. Rutgers said. “It’s the backbone of everything we’ve ever done. I loved growing up there and felt lucky to have parents who were in Aspen when it was really happening.”

In 2013, Mr. Rutgers presented a small collection to a family friend, Lee Keating, who, alongside her husband, Tom Bowers, owns the Aspen boutique Performance Ski. The shop became the first wholesaler to support the brand. To this day, Ms. Keating appreciates Aztech’s minimalist aesthetic in a world of more-is-more ski style.

“They stay in their lane,” she said. “They don’t put a ton of fur on their jackets. They don’t bedazzle their jackets. There are no crystals, no feathers, no extra logos. It’s quiet and cool. If you get it, you get it.”

Triana Trujillo, a personal stylist in Aspen, loves to mix and match combinations of Aztech’s prints and solids. She finds the collections to be on-trend without feeling extreme.

“You see a lot of tourists coming in wearing big, crazy pieces and super-tight pants on the mountain,” Ms. Trujillo said. “Locals love Aztech because we tend to dress more on the technical side.”

For those who see the slopes as their personal catwalk, the ski fashion scene has never looked better. Independent labels like Goldbergh, Cordova and Perfect Moment are carving out space in the sector alongside heritage brands like Bogner and Moncler. Even ready-to-wear stalwarts like Zegna, Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana are swapping city suits for ski suits. The result is a growing assortment of options that cater to those whose choice of ski is après ski.

“We always say that if you can wear it in New York and Aspen, it’s a good product,” Mr. Rutgers said. Their women’s Super Nuke jacket, for instance, has a cropped silhouette that can work with a ski bib or with jeans and boots.

“But it’s a challenge we face,” he said. “What are we? Are we fashion? Are we ski? The easy answer is that we are ski, true and true.”

Aztech’s fashion campaigns could have you thinking otherwise. Mr. Rutgers collaborates with fashion industry veterans like Casey Cadwallader, the artistic director of Mugler, and Laura Zaccheo, the former head of knitwear at Marc Jacobs. The fashion stylist Jay Massacret, who has worked with McQueen, Kenzo and Calvin Klein, styles the high-concept lookbooks and social campaigns. They shoot the clothing not on a mountain but in unexpected locales, like the Imperial Sand Dunes in California or on the streets of Paris. It’s not what one might find in Backcountry magazine.

There’s also the question of how to scale “Aspen.” As Aztech Mountain expands into global markets, the challenge is not just growth, it’s preserving the label’s distinct Aspen ethos while translating it for destinations steeped in their own ski traditions. In December, the company opened its first shop-in-shop at the Hotel Alberg in Lech, Austria, a move that signaled its commitment to reinterpreting the Aspen mind-set for a discerning European market that’s loyal to legacy brands.

But which Aspen is Aztech selling? Between the influencer brigade and skyrocketing home prices, today’s Aspen is far from the tight-knit ski town of yesteryear. The locals-first spirit of unpretentious powder seekers has given way to a scene in which lift lines are longer, tables at Cache Cache book out months in advance and the cost of entry — for a family of four or a single season pass — has never been steeper.

Still, for those who know where to look, the soul of old Aspen lingers: in the first tracks at Highlands, on a well-worn stool at J Bar and among the subtle nods exchanged in a gondola.

“In the beginning, we thought Aspen was going to be a put-off for people,” Mr. Rutgers said. “Can we talk about Aspen if we’re trying to sell in St. Moritz or Lech or Lenzerheide? What we realized was that we had to lean into it. I’ve been lucky to ski pretty much everywhere, and every time I come back to Aspen, I’m reminded that this place is truly special.”