Photo: Burton Snowboards
How much can change in a decade? When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s easy to daydream of life a decade down the road and see great things. But big grand dreams don’t materialize unless that decade is filled with a lot of hard work, long days, rejections, and failures.
Now try 50 years. Jake Burton Carpenter likely had no idea what his dream for snowboarding would look like today when he started building boards in Vermont and slinging them out of his car. But here we are 50 years later and the sport is in the Olympics. It’s not for outcasts. The mountains where snowboarders aren’t allowed are now the outliers. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Burton has produced Sideways Revolution, a full-length documentary on the history of the company (and hence, the sport). It’s narrated by none other than Donna Carpenter herself, who laid every brick alongside her husband Jake as they built it all together.
“The game was changed,” in Carpenter’s words, in 1985. That’s the moment when years of development and testing, trial and error meant the world started to catching on to this new trendy thing in the mountains. She points to the equipment being the catalyst for a turning point in that moment. Equipment had been evolving every year but 1985 was the year she says, “Burton started making boards with all the DNA of today’s modern snowboard.”
“By 1986 Burton Snowboards were being produced in a real factory by people who actually knew what they were doing,” she says, adding that Jake had been building “a team” along the way. Not of board builders, but of people who were riding his equipment and showing it off for the world. The biggest swing of them all: Jake got his hands on a helicopter and took the team out to make their first film, Winter Waves.
“Burton followed up Winter Waves with One Track Mind, doubling down on the annual video and creating a touchstone in snowboarding culture. It was incredible what Jake had built one decade in,” a nod to the brand’s evolution from those first wood and polyurethane planks to a full-blown line with boards, boots, outerwear, and media.
