ONE MOMENT, Robert Marcovitch is sipping coffee and talking about his hometown of Montreal. The next, he's on the phone with someone from China. Then he's taking a guest on a tour of the sales, legal and customer-service departments at his offices in the SoDo district, zipping along carpeted hallways and talking fast.
 
Marcovitch, 50, is president of K2 Sports, the renowned maker of skis, snowboards and other outdoor recreation equipment. Dressed in jeans and a zip-up jacket, he doesn't look like a typical president. Inside his company's new world headquarters in Seattle, he arrives at a 70,000-square-foot former warehouse in a multipurpose building that looms large in K2's future. In June 2006, K2 Sports announced it would move from its Vashon Island location to Seattle. By late spring or early summer, this empty space will be transformed into a state-of-the-art product-development facility. An additional 200,000 square feet in the building will become the company's U.S. distribution facility, replacing space it currently leases in Fife. Another 28,000 square feet of space will become corporate offices.

Nearly 300 employees will move into the new corporate headquarters. The product development facility, the heart of the space, will be designed to work and feel like a small city, where test lab, machine shop, and prototyping personnel can interact with each other. They can arrange their workspaces according to their needs, skateboarding inside the multi-purpose building if they want. A new fitness center may include a full-court basketball court and an inline-skate hockey rink.

"We have free-thinking people," Marcovitch says.

The key to growing the company and making employees - and customers - happy is to balance "the pride and the prize," he says. The pride is the company's distinctive brand of products and its delicate embrace of an easygoing yet serious-minded office life. The prize is a new headquarters from which to gain more visibility: the cosmopolitan image that comes with being headquartered in a big city instead of on a small island, with better access to vendors, prospective employees and customers.

K2 started on Vashon Island as the brainchild of Kirschner Manufacturing, which was producing splints and animal cages using reinforced plastic. "In 1961, using a pair of borrowed skis as a pattern, Bill Kirschner made a pair of fiberglass skis," according to HistoryLink.org, an online encyclopedia of Washington state history. The idea was to build something lighter and stronger than the typical wood and metal skis.

Beginning in the late 1960s, K2 underwent a series of changes in ownership. Renamed K2 Sports in 2003, the company is a subsidiary of K2 Inc., a publicly traded company based in Carlsbad, Calif., that saw earnings increase by 22 percent - from $32 million to $39 million - on sales of $1.3 billion, according to the company's 2005 annual report. In addition to skis, K2 Sports sells K2, Ride, Morrow, Liquid and 5150 snowboards; Atlas and Tubbs snowshoes; K2 inline skates and Ride Outerwear. K2 Sports has subsidiaries in Central Europe, Canada, Norway and Japan. The company's manufacturing plant is in China, and it has a research and development facility in South Korea.

These days, the company is focused on its new headquarters in Seattle. The idea to relocate belongs to Marcovitch, who views the move as a crucial step in furthering the company's growth. The move will "catapult us to becoming a global company," he says. "Everything will be under one roof for the first time since the company's inception."

Born in Montreal, Robert Marcovitch grew up in a family where reaching the age of 16 meant you either went to work part-time in dad's garment factory or you found another part-time job after school.

When Marcovitch's two brothers turned 16, they took jobs in their dad's factory. But Marcovitch got a job as a clerk in a ski shop and "basically never left," he says. Marcovitch worked his way up in a variety of retail and wholesale businesses, learning, as he puts it, from the "ground up, below the ground, subterranean." In the mid-1990s, he was president and CEO of Ride Snowboards. As president, he sold the company to K2 in 1999 and then joined K2, serving as president of K2 Canada before being promoted to president of K2 Sports in 2003.

Marcovitch says K2 Sports' new location will allow it to tap into the same talent pool available to companies like Microsoft and Boeing. While the company enjoyed success on Vashon Island, he adds, it became difficult to justify a location that required an hourlong ferry ride to reach, especially to prospective employees. K2 Sports' decision to stay in King County pleases enterprise Seattle, formerly known as the Economic Development Council of Seattle & King County, which helps recruit, maintain and expand businesses in the region. "You couldn't ask for a better corporate citizen," says Jeff Marcell, vice president of economic development for enterprise Seattle. The agency is helping K2 Sports with the transition, including complying with the state's Commute Trip Reduction law, which requires companies with at least 100 employees to produce a plan to help reduce drive-alone commuting and to encourage carpooling or riding the bus. Stephen Gerritson, a business development manager for enterpriseSeattle who focuses on clean energy and technology, says the agency will help K2 Sports' employees decide what they want from the program and then help the company obtain grant money to provide reduced-rate bus passes or bike lockers, for example.

"They're very concerned about their employees' well-being," Gerritson says.

Perhaps Marcovitch's decision to move to the new mainland location was the easy part. The company is spending millions of dollars on redesigning and reshaping the 70,000-square-foot former warehouse into a state-of-the-art facility.

The task of making the company better organized, more efficient and increasingly global, without losing its funky creativeness beloved by employees and customers alike, Marcovitch has handed to Robert Zimmer, a soft-spoken, 49-year-old architect who worked for LMN Architects for about 18 years (including as project director on Seattle's Central Library) before starting his own firm.

Inside a conference room at the new headquarters, Zimmer, his square-rimmed glasses drooped on the bridge of his nose, pops open his IBM laptop and scrolls and clicks his conceptual designs into view. What Zimmer wants to do is arrange a "concentrated amount of mixed uses" inside the 70,000 square feet of space, where upper and lower floors provide space for product-development and marketing personnel.

The machine shop won't be located far away, Zimmer says, and "there's going to be a circulation network" that connects everything.

Employees will find a flexible work environment that blends the character of typical office space with "what feels more like industrial loft space," Zimmer says. "Each of the (work) groups can appropriate that space as they see fit," Zimmer adds.

Plans also call for espresso machines, naturallight and fitness areas, and spaces for gathering and talking.

Zimmer taps the keys on his laptop, revealing another conceptual design: Employees sip coffee at tables near large indoor trees. Exposed duct work runs overhead.

Zimmer says the trees are only one part of a plan to capture K2 Sports' emphasis on outdoor sports.

"Hopefully, we can come up with a whole lot of other ways to do that," he says, including using natural materials as much as possible in reshaping the space.

To Marcovitch, the sum of these elements is interaction and freedom. K2 Sports, he says, is a place where the "frat boys and sorority girls" in the ski division should be able to mingle with the contrarians in the snowboard division, and where both groups should occasionally see and talk to the folks who work in the machine shop.

All of them, he says, need a place where they're "not going to feel imprisoned." And Marcovitch hopes the new Seattle footprint hits home with K2 Sports' customers, including the "Bohemian athletes" and the fickle 11- to 24-year-old crowd who crave authenticity. "If you're not real," Marcovitch says, "if you don't live it and breathe it, you're not going to be successful."

Aaron Corvin is a senior writer for Washington CEO.