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Jake Burton is the founder of Burton Sno wboards, one of the first
and most inno vative snowboard manufacturers in the world. Josh Sims speaks to
the man who shaped th e sport as we know it today.
Photos by Jeff Curtes
When more than two Feet of snow falls in Burlington, Vermont, Everybody at
Jake Burton’s company gets the day off. Not cause the roads impassable or
the heating can’t cope, but because Jake is Burton of Burton Snwboards,
and both he and his employees swap jobs for their jibs and halfpipe spins. They’re
boning out, riding air to fakle, pulling rodeo flips, mctwists and cripplers,
or any of the other curiously-named tricks that devotees of this winter sport
are constantly creating.
“I’ve been snowboarding for a long time,” says the 49- year-old,
who still tests every board design personally, “and in the style of riding
that I do, yeah, I’m probably pretty
good. I like to ride a lot of powder, but get me in a halfpipe and my kids are
already better than me. But I love to ride—at least 100 days of the year.
It’s a huge part of my life.”
Snow
sports are booming—they’re worth some $2.2bn globally—and a
recent study showed that snowboarding is now the US’s fastest growing sport
(especially among the key 12- to 24-year-old age bracket) and is set to overtake
skiing in terms of participants in the next few years. European ski resorts
are witnessing the same shift in participation, and Innsbruck - HQ of Burton division
- is seeing ever higher numbers of the snow surfers.
Today Jake Burton is riding the crest of the wave, but he had little business
experience when he took his first entrepreneurial steps. He'd has a small
landscaping business with a friend and spent year assisting at a big New York
firm specialising in take- overs. But there was nothing to suggest that
he would soon be at the forefront of a worldwide movement in youth culture.
Indeed, snowboarding was still an underground activity when, with some inheritance
money, he opened his first snowboard factory in a farmhouse in 1977.
The comany now sells to over 4,000 shops across 36 countries, and incorporates
a family spin-off companies making performance/fashion footwear and clothing.
But two years after launching, Jake was $100,000 in debt - three times the amount
he had estinated would be needed - and had to bartend by night and teach tennis
by day to keep the payroll operational.
"To be honest I thought the whole thing would happen a lot faster than
it did," Burton admits. "I had some entrepreneurial experience,
and was ambitious and in a job that really wasn't for me. But at the same
time it allowed me to interview all these business guys and it struck me that
what they did didn’t seem that difficult. In the beginning I think it was
all kind of a get-rich-quick scheme. I really had no clue what my market was.
I thought I’d be making snowboards for 23-year-olds like me who had had
a Snurfer (short protosnowboard). The customers turned out to be 14-year-olds
just like I was when I got into it all. I was very wrong in the assumption that
I was the market.”
It was quality of product—and the birth of a market looking precisely
for that—that won through. Burton remains at the forefront of snowboard
design, and Jake has spent many a day in hardware stores and ski factories probing
for ideas that are now industry standards.
“Manufacturing has all become very scientific, but our engineers still
understand snowboarding the way I do. There are companies with great resources
who come into the business but don’t understand the sport and that
gives us an edge,” he says. “But while I’d had a service business
mowing lawns and planting trees, manufacturing is a very different, very challenging
process. It’s perhaps easier these days: you can go to China and get anything
made. But back then I had to learn to make the product myself. I came very close
to giving up on several occasions and had some hellish times. When it became clear
that I wasn’t going to make a great living doing it for the foreseeable
future I just became focused on looking out for the sport. Then everything else
took care of itself. I feel an incredible obligation to the sport because it’s
done so much for me.”
And his dedication to the sport remains clear. “I think the focus on
productivity and making things cheaply or delivering more efficiently can be something
we get caught up in, when really we should be thinking about how we make snowboarding
more fun,” Burton adds. “It’s a lifestyle business and that
means fashion is destined to be part of it. Style and expression have always been
aspects of the sport. But that doesn’t mean you feel obliged to make shit
that doesn’t work. And we have to be careful that snowboarding doesn’t
become elitist, as skiing did, with all the magazines not about hardcore skiing
but about which resort has the best food, or which roof rack will fit on your
BMW. It ceased to be youth-driven and became class or status-driven. Snowboarding
can’t fall into that trap. But I think we’re a long way from that
happening.”
Burton
has also been behind the moves that have made snowboarding into a cultish activity
across Europe since the mid ’80s, when he moved to Austria to launch his
business in Europe. Soon after that, the first snowboard shop opened selling imported
Burton boards, the French Ski Magazine began running snowboard tests, and, as
more and more people realised the truth of the maxim “two skis good, one
big ski better,” Europe began producing its own world-class riders.
These days, if the US scene has come to be dominated by specially-created snow
parks, in Europe Burton is king of the snow-capped hills. If you find yourself
in one of Europe’s snowy destinations this winter, expect a mirror- goggled
Burton associate—or at least a piece of Burton equipment—to come hurtling
by.
“Some
of the best freeriders are coming out of Europe now,” says Burton. “But
there it’s really still an all- mountain experience. The mountains in Europe
are just so insane, there’s no way you’ll get riders there in parks
when they have such incredible ranges in their back yard. The freestyler Craig
Kelly was a guy who had a big impact on me.
He died in an avalanche but he was always a believer that snowboarding was
about combining freestyle manoeuvres with natural terrain. And I think that’s
essential to the core of the sport. It’s where we push the limits.”
UNFULFILLED AMBITIONS:
“I haven’t figured out the succession of the company and how I’m
going to set the brand up for its future. That’s a huge challenge for a
privately-held entrepreneur like myself.”
1. Management is a learning process.
2. I had no idea what I was getting into. People have said I had great vision
but really I’m much more proud of the perseverance and sticking through
the whole thing.
3. I felt I had to deceive to manage, but it’s only when you’re really
honest with someone that you can work with them and accomplish things.
4. No matter how tough things are I can guarantee that you’ll look back
on what then seemed like the worst of times as the good old days.
5. I don’t want to pat myself on the back but I don’t think we’d
be better off as a public company. A few snowboard companies went public and made
huge gains, but this business doesn’t operate that way.
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