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Meet the HalfdayerCasting Call: NYCBuilding a Community of Moms Who Love to Ski

Picture this: the first day of Autumn has arrived with a crisp wind in the air, your favorite Fall jackets have made their way out of the coat closet, and the Halfdays team has just touched down in New York City to shoot the long-awaited Ski Collection.

We were honored to host some vibrant NYC locals for our shoot in Williamsburg, where we turned a Brooklyn studio into a winter wonderland for the day. Among them: an editor of The Cut NY Mag who loves to snowboard and hunt down Asian restaurants in the city, a red headed mother-daughter duo, a DJ who’s toured with Lil Wayne, and a longtime Halfdays fan who learned to ski after getting escorted down a mountain by ski patrol.

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The Halfdayer building a community of moms who love to ski

Nicole Feliciano

After commenting on our NYC Casting Call, we invited Nicole Feliciano to our Ski Campaign shoot to tell us a little bit more about her mission in the niche of snow sports.

Nicole is an unconventional mom blogger – she’s trading in parenting tips and recipes for all things snow sports. As the CEO of Momtrends.com, a platform that provides working moms with trusted tips for creating the best experiences on snow, her goal is to get more women out of the lodge, and out into the snow. We met Nicole in a Brooklyn Studio this September to chat more about building a community within snow sports for women.

Snow sports are Nicole’s forté. Growing up playing lacrosse in Maryland, she was late to the sport of skiing. Once getting herself out on the slopes in a pair of skis, an enthusiasm and willingness to learn and share her tips for success, especially as an adult learner of a sport that is too often reserved for those who learned as children or an industry that is dominated by male influence. She recognized a big gap in the market between mothers and snow sports and hoped to fill that space with some positive reinforcement. The result? A community of 8500 members in her Ski Moms Facebook group.

In the snow-sports niche, Nicole manages social media platforms @skimomsfun on Instagram and Facebook. She is also the co-host of the Ski Moms Fun Podcast and manages the Facebook group. Nicole constantly comes back to her goal to get more women out of the lodge and out onto the snow through the content she creates and fosters across her digital platforms.

“When you find a winter sport, it opens up a big opportunity for women,” Nicole says. Having learned to ski well into her 30s, Nicole finds that exploring winter sports helped her get out of her comfort zone and infuse a new area of recreation and fun into her adult life. As an athlete, she finds this dedication to being active very profound and important for all women and is a lesson she teaches to her two teenage daughters: “Playing sports from a really young age was really important to me. When you start seeing that your body is there to do things for you, rather than look a certain way, that made a big difference in my life. I’m trying to have my girls take that to heart as well. You’re not a size, you’re not a number – you’re your capabilities and the things you can do.”

As a mother, snow sports offer a time to look forward to during the year to get outside and spend time with family. Many reserve this school of thought for warmer months, but as Nicole says, “A lot of people see winter as a sad time, or a time to spend indoors. But I think you’re just one piece of gear away from having a good time outdoors during this time.”

These days, Nicole bounces back and forth between Vermont and Brooklyn. Sugarbush is her go-to mountain in Vermont, but her personal favorite resort is Sun Valley in Idaho. “[Sun Valley] feels very European to me in the way they’ve combined the culture, as well as the architecture, and the on-mountain experience.”