OUR PHILOSOHY
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OUR PHILOSOHY *
Hockey is quietly becoming a sport for fewer people - and part of the reason is hiding in plain sight: players are paying for brand structures, sponsorships, and marketing budgets, not for better performance. Most players don't need the most expensive stick. They need an honest one, at a price that lets them stay on the ice.
Mission
Giving back to hockey everything the sport has given us, with one goal: more people on the ice.
VISION
A world where players don’t have to choose between quality and cost, and every stick gets a second life.
FOUNDERS
RICCARDO cORIO
I've been playing hockey for over 25 years - not as a professional, but as someone who never stopped showing up. It started as a kid in Piazza Zara, rollerblades and a beat-up puck on hot concrete, organizing tournaments among ourselves just to have a reason to keep playing.
It grew into something more: around 200 senior ice hockey games, the national inline team, more than 15 junior titles.
But what stayed with me was never the results.
It was the people, the locker rooms, the victory, the losses, the road trips, the post-game beers.
In many ways, this sport shaped the person I am today.
After almost 10 years working as a strategy and analytics consultant, I started connecting the dots: I knew how companies work from the inside - their numbers, their processes, their choices. And I knew hockey from the inside too. That combination made one problem impossible to ignore. I had watched teammates delay replacing helmets and pads because a stick had already cost them €300. I had felt the same pressure myself. Some frequent players go through two, sometimes three or four sticks a season - at €300 each, that's around €1,000 a year just to stay on the ice. And sticks are just the beginning of what a player has to buy.
That's not just a pricing problem - that's a values problem, and it had been sitting in the back of my mind for years.
Mistral was born in January 2025 from a simple question: how do you say thank you to a sport that has given you so much? My answer was to build something real, fair, and conscious - the LaMole line: high-performance Carbon 18K sticks, shaped by real player feedback with an honest pricing. Not to disrupt an industry, but to prove that performance and fairness don't have to be a trade-off.
But the cost of a stick isn't only financial. Hockey has a waste problem nobody talks about: carbon fiber sticks break constantly, and almost none of them get recycled. Mistral is exploring how broken carbon-fibre sticks can be recovered and given a second life - so that a broken stick doesn't just end up in a bin, but becomes part of something new. It's a small step toward a longer-term vision: that this sport belongs to everyone who loves it — not just those who can afford it.
ALEX ZORLONI
Alex, one of my best teammates and a true hockey enthusiast, brings 15 years of on-ice experience to Mistral. Over countless games – and a few beers – we realized we shared the same vision: to create a brand that truly understands what players need.