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It Only Looks Easy

Burton is unusual in that it's based in the East. Most snowboarding companies, strangely, are scattered around southern California, hours from snow. Burton is just a half-hour from Stowe. Every employee gets a season pass. If it snows two feet--admittedly a rarity anymore--everyone gets the day off to board. Like the corporate love of canines, this fact is often pointed to by marketers and public relations persons, so often that if you were a skeptical person, you would start to think that maybe this was primarily a clever recruiting tool cum viral marketing strategy, like the old climbing-wall-in-the-dot-com-cafeteria legend. In the Burton press kit's fact sheet, just below "Head Count" and a blurb on Burton's hugely successful "Learn to Ride" program, there is a small section titled "Powder Days and Dogs." And I quote: "The dogs are some of Burton's most valued employees."

It's charming and also very clever--yet it's hard to be skeptical when you've observed the employees at work. Obviously, people have bad days, and paperwork will always be paperwork, but you just get the sense that most of the people working there are having as much fun as Jake.

"The thing you really have to give to Jake," says Jon Foster, co-founder and creative director of The Snowboard Journal, "is that as all the other companies went from being five guys in a garage to selling out to the likes of K2, Jake still has control of his company, and it's still just snowboarding. Burton is big, but it's real."

Jake's place is even closer to the mountain, down a long dirt road that cuts through a forest of birch and pine. The main house sits in a clearing; it is a gray post-and-beam farmhouse renovated and expanded but still very much looking like it should have apple pies cooling on the sill. Next to the house is an old red barn, trucked in from New Hampshire and rebuilt in the yard. On the ground floor, the barn houses a four-car garage; upstairs, it's a huge, loft-style apartment with an open kitchen and three guest rooms, one with eight bunks. Winters are frigid in northern Vermont, so Jake connected the two buildings with an underground passage lit by lanterns. It's a good 50 yards or so, and skateboards sit at each end for rapid transit back and forth.

In the kitchen, a woman packs lunches. Jake grabs a can of Starbucks espresso from a glass-fronted fridge full of seltzers and sodas and digs into a sandwich from Donna's gourmet food store in Stowe. (For years, Donna worked for the company, serving for a period as chief financial officer and at one point running its European operations from Austria. She's been semiretired since their youngest son, Timmy, was born, but is one of Jake's primary advisers and still plays an active role, especially in the fast-growing women's business.)

Jake's office setup is just like the one at Eighty. In place of a desk, plaid country-style couches face a wood table. There are more snowboards, more jackets, more shirts, more hats--if the Burton family ever ran out of cash they could put all the free gear on sale and outfit most of New England.

Jake excuses himself to change out of his snow pants and returns in a disarmingly casual getup: some black tights over which he's put shorts; up top, he wears a green Burton T-shirt. He kicks back, puts his hands behind his head and rests his feet on a table, appearing every bit as relaxed as he is often said to be. There is an aura about him, I'm realizing, but that aura is one of utter calm; there isn't the slightest hint of pretension or edge, which isn't typical of men who own their own jets.

We flip through the 250-page catalog, one of Jake's pet projects. Like the company's ads, it is lushly photographed, with page after page of action photography. In this year's catalog, the most hyped product is the Vapor, billed as the "lightest, strongest, most versatile board ever." It is said to be "the next chapter in snowboard construction" and is built on a proprietary technology known as Vaportech. A sample line from the catalog: "The fact is that no one has the resources and knowledge to do what we do." This sort of bold language is characteristic of the company's literature, and when Jake talks, it is clearly with the assumption that no one does snowboards and snowboard gear better. But because he's so laid-back, you often don't realize he's bragging.

"We're a profit-oriented company; we've been able to take a good chunk of it and put it into R&D," he says. "And we've competed against the bigger guys--the Rossignols and Solomons and K2s of the world--by being focused purely on snowboarding." What he means is that those companies were built on skiing, and thus have conflicting priorities. "Our focus and commitment to the sport has been a huge edge against those guys," he continues. "Then you've got these core little snowboard companies, and we compete against them by just having resources to have technology and kick-ass R&D. They even joke about it. They say, 'Yeah, we have an R&D section: It's called Burton.'"