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It Only Looks Easy

You shouldn't take this to mean that Jake Burton is stepping away from the company he founded, the one that is very much responsible for taking a fringey pursuit and making it one of the fastest-growing sports on earth. Burton works every day. Sure, his yearlong world tour was vacation but it was also market research. Much as he took a six-month leave in the '80s to pick up German, then moved to Austria with Donna for a year to learn the nuances of the European market before entering it with his company, he spent parts of his round-the-world trip immersing himself in the far-flung corners of snowboarding culture. He spent a month in the Andes, a month in New Zealand, a month each in his two biggest foreign outposts, Austria and Japan.

The year 2004, according to the National Sporting Goods Association, was the first year in which more snowboarders took to the slopes than skiers. Burton, not surprisingly, had its best year yet. Every year is its best year, with the exception of 2001, when certain catastrophic events occurred at the onset of the season, during the 90-day retail window when most snowboarding goods are purchased.

That $400 million estimate on the size of the snowboarding business covers only equipment and clothing--it's good money for 90 days. (It is impossible to separate snowboarding from skiing when it comes to things such as lift tickets and lodging, but the snow-sports business overall is estimated at about $9 billion.) Almost from the day he set up shop in southern Vermont, handshaping his boards and servicing retailers from the back of his station wagon, Jake Burton has ruled snowboarding. Today, more than 5,000 specialty shops worldwide carry Burton products, more than 2,000 in the U.S. alone.

The 50 percent of the market Burton doesn't control is divided among dozens of brands, most of which specialize in one specific area: boards or bindings or apparel. The skiing company K2, with its portfolio of brands including Ride Snowboards, would probably rank second, says David Ingemie, president of SnowSports Industries America, skiing and snowboarding's trade group. "But Burton has never really had a challenger who came close. Not in the total package." Of Burton's early rivals, only Tom Sims of Sims Snowboards remains in business.

The keys to Burton's success are no mystery. "First of all it's American," Ingemie says. (America being the birthplace of the sport and the keeper of its flame.) "Second, it's privately owned, which enables it to stay dedicated and make decisions not necessarily reflected in the next quarter. That makes a big difference. Snowboarding is a one-turn business that is unlike any other. You produce a product this year and if it's wrong, you're dead. You have to wait until next year. Burton just gets it right."

Much of that precision comes from Jake, who is obsessed with the product. He personally tests nearly everything the company makes, and what he doesn't know--a little more all the time, he acknowledges--he entrusts to people who do. Burton leans heavily on the members of Burton Global, a collection of professional snowboarders who consult on everything from style to fit to materials. (Three Burton Global riders were on the 2006 U.S. Olympic team, along with two more Burton-sponsored riders.) They are friends and advisers, business partners and buddies. At Burton, it's all the same thing. The company has the money and expertise to dominate research and development and the on-mountain credibility to influence style and trends. "In a lot of cases they see the trend before it happens," says Ingemie. "It was the toecap binding, now it's plaid clothing. They nailed the helmet when they started R.E.D. helmets. No snowboarder was wearing a helmet before that."

Last fall, Burton introduced Mark XIII, a line of high-end snow apparel sold at peacocky department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. The line's signature is a series of jackets developed in collaboration with natty British clothier Paul Smith. The most expensive of them is $900. Not long after, Burton Snowboards did something even riskier. It strolled off the mountain for the first time under the Burton name and rolled out its initial season of year-round streetwear, called Burton Life, using a flashy new retail store in New York City's SoHo neighborhood as a sort of style lab. The store has white walls and a cold room for testing jackets; it also sells special bags for stashing your weed. The store appears to be, in snowboarder's parlance, absolutely killing it.