Moral of that story is to make sure to use some obnoxious stickers to help our kids equipment stand out.
This is important to adults as well as for kids.
This last Feb I was assigned to teach a group of never-ever British teens, accompanied by one adult never-ever teacher-chaperone. This was for three days of lessons. They were all on rental equipment, and the skis were all the same brand and model. To these newbies, they all looked the same.
There must have been 200 teenage-school-vacation-skiers and their adult chaperones from all over England on the hill those three days. Many of them were never-evers unfamiliar with ski gear. After their first day of skiing, all the skis were stored together in a shed on the mountain. On day two I met my group outside the shed and we took off. After we rode the chair up and started off on a green trail, I realized my chaperone guy had picked up the wrong pair of skis out of that shed. His bindings kept letting go. He could make maybe two turns then out he'd pop, falling in the soft snow. Evidently the rental shop did not impress upon these new skiers the importance of memorizing the sku number on the sticker on their skis.
When I realized he could not keep his boots connected to his skis, I stopped the group and sent a message down the hill for ski patrol to come to us to pick this guy up in a sled and give him a ride back to the rental shop. This took time, but left a lasting impression on them all about the importance of bindings being matched to the boots. Unfortunately it also embarrassed the chaperone, who was a math teacher at the school. He seemed to deal with it as well as possible.
I wish our rental shop would do something more obvious than ask them to remember the sku number. Stickers would be great, or better yet, writing the name of the skier on a piece of tape on the skis. There's a lot of stimulation going on with a group of teens out-of-country for vacation at a ski resort. They won't all be able to absorb all the information coming at them fast on their first day of skiing.