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Gary Harbon, from Carmarthen, built a snowboard, out of carbon.

August 21, 2014, 6:04 am
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This year there's a new British snowboard company on the block called Snow Candy. We interviewed them to try and find out just what the hell was going on...


Who are you and what made you want to start your own snowboard company?

Simply put we are just a bunch of snowboarders who wanted something that we couldn't get our hands on so we decided to take matters into our own hands. We spent about 2 years thinking about how we could come up with a board that would be unique, having failed more than once over that course of time.
We really started the company for a huge list of reasons but the best reason for us is we love nothing more that hitting the slopes.

What you're gong to see here is that the team behind Snow Candy answer questions like they're politicians; answering them without actually saying anything. The guy I'm interviewing here is called Gary Harbon, the aforementioned fella from Carmarthen. I can tell you why he started this company, because he has the finest aptronym in all of snowboarding and he was pre-determined to build something out of carbon. He was as destined to build this snowboard as William Wordsworth was to be a poet, Usain Bolt was to be a spinter, Marina Stepanova a hurdler, and Shaun White to be a snowboarder.

Gary Harbon, from Carmarthen, with his car, in his peculiarly limited garden.

Going back to his answer, a hell of a lot of people love "hitting the slopes", but very few think the next logical step is to build a carbon fibre snowboard company. I tried to dig a little deeper...


What makes your company truly different? One of the things you say on your site is that the snowboards are "designed by snowboarders", but I don't know of any snowboards that aren't designed by snowboarders. 

This is true :)
The materials we use in our boards and the way they are constructed is what makes us truly unique as well as our philosophy in listening to what people want.
To be fair what we really want to get across is we want to get across [sic] that these boards haven't been put together with just the pros in mind but the average boarder.

The only videos of these boards in action are the Snow Candy team riding them in a UK snow dome, and I'm going to have to assume this is them running some testing specifically for their target market of the "average boarder"...

They have a pretty strange definition of 'pow'


And of course there isn't a single snowboard company that doesn't listen to what people want or build boards for the average person. I wasn't getting anywhere with this, so I thought I'd help out a little...


To the best of my knowledge you might be the first ever snowboarding company based in Wales. Do you think that is the case and what does that add into the mix?

As far as we know yes we are the only snowboarding company based in Wales and the welsh [sic] are well know for coming up with some mad ideas as well as the sheep that can be added into the mix lol :)

From that I was expecting some awesome graphics like the 2012/13 DC PBJ graphic...


But the Snow Candy board graphics are a little more understated...



Are you making the snowboards in Wales or are they built by someone else to your specifications?

At the moment the boards aren't made here in wales [sic] but are made to our specification.
We will be be looking to move production to Wales as soon as we are able as we currently looking for [sic] bigger premises to set up shop in.



How would you compare yourself to Douk? (the only company manufacturing snowboards in the UK)

In all honesty.... we love what they do! Douk make fantastic boards and the fact that they are based in the UK is amazing as far we are concerned. It just goes to show what guys here in britain [sic] really have to offer.
Not that were trying to avoid the question but as for a direct comparison goes we both make boards but from very different materials and until people really go out and ride our boards on mass [sic] who’s to say which construction is better.

You are avoiding the question.



How much has it cost to set-up the brand in the UK and what's been the hardest part of the process so far?

We have spend [sic] a little over £15k so far, all out our own pockets but the reality is we have only just started to scratch the surface of the UK and we know that we have a serious amount of work to do to get the brand out there.
The hardest part for us was trying to get the boards construction right which was such a pain as we wanted it to be made entirely out of carbon fibre! In the end we had to combine some elements of a more traditional construction such as a bamboo core.
I don’t think any single part of the process has been all that easy, but having spent all our time on the boards themselves we have only just started to our teeth [sic] into the marketing side of the business.

And the initial investment in marketing will be spent on correcting the spelling and grammar of all the previous marketing output. The best example being this video on their YouTube channel, where they've even managed to spell Gary's name wrong...




How many boards have you sold so far, and how many are you hoping to shift this season?

We have only sold just sort [sic] of a hundred so far but since we haven't really done enough to market them which are working on [sic] we are hoping to really drive the numbers over the course of this season. Fingers crossed :)



What's the reasons behind the name Snow Candy? Were you in some way influenced by the hit song from the presumably transvestite South Korean pop band Starship Planet? 



Ha, we have never seen that video but god dame [sic] that was funny!
The name came from us having a few beers one night after a day on the slopes and one of the guys just came out with it! We all thought it was a bit cheesy if Im [sic] honest but it somehow stuck.

It's also easily confused with Snow Candy the chalet company.



How you you integrate the carbon fibre and what does it add to the snowboard?

This was one interesting challenge for us as we wanted to add a few characteristics  to the boards that have perviously [sic] been a problem.
The entire board with exception of the base, steel edges, and the core, is made out of carbon fibre as we wanted to not only make the board light but also more flexible which was one of our primary goals compared to traditional constructions and also less prone to delimitation [sic].




What is a BamBoom! core when it's at home?

Top Secret!!!

Only Kidding! We changed the construction of the bamboo core so rather than using a load of bamboo all in the same direction we decided to weave each individual strip in different direction [sic] so that the core will also flex to a degree in every direction.



Finally, your site recommends Union, RuRoc and GoPro. What's the link with them?

We will shortly be stocking Union Bindings on our site and as for the RuRoc and GoPro we simple [sic] love these companies and all our team use them. A good lid is a real essential for the slopes and what better to catch the action with than with a GoPro.

They really do love their RuRocs...

A brace of RuRocs


RuRocs to the right


RuRocs staring lovingly into each other's lenses


A RuRoc-skin rug


RuRoc on a picnic bench

A RuRoc selfie, of a RoRoc selfie, of a RuRoc selfie, of a RuRoc selfie, of a....





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Scientifically this is the most fashionable man in snowboarding

September 5, 2014, 5:59 am
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The first Whitelines magazine of the season, the buyers' guide, is out on the shelves now and the quick purchasers amongst you might have noticed that a couple  of the pages have been coloured in by us. Illicit has gone non-clickable. We were tasked with what turned out to be a very tricky job of creating a mildly-amusing infographic. On the face of it that seemed straightforward, until we realised that those two things are mutually exclusive. Still, we forged on and produced the definitive historical guide to snowboarding fashion trends and weirdly enough it turns out that this cheeky chap might just be the most fashionable man in snowboarding...

Here's a sneaky peak at all the science we splashed across the two pages of Whitelines. This was the second draft, I was told by the editors that my first draft wasn't "illicit" enough. Once we'd got over the inevitable bafflement that this vague directive caused, I do now agree that the second version was better. Maybe they know what they're doing.



We can't really show you the whole thing, but all those lines and facts ended up showing that these were some of the key fashion trends for this season:
  • Roll-up beanies are in.
  • Camo is constantly in.
  • Earthy colours are so 2014/15.
  • Pants and stances should be rocked comfortably average this season.
  • And beards are at generational peak.

Once we'd sent our picture over to Whitelines uncomfortably close to something they call a 'print deadline', another of the Whitelines editors (they have a flock of them) after reading the conclusion, pointed out this guy:

Holly shit, does this man have his finger on the pulse of fashion. 
(The pulse of fashion represented here by a whispy ginger beard)


His name is Brandon Cocard, and although he is blessed by being incredibly on-fashion he has been cursed with the most innuendo-laden name in snowboarding. Cocard is a professional snowboarder in the Capita, Union and Airblaster teams, but perhaps the most significant moment in his life until now was his appearance in Jade the Snowboarder Magazine intern's list of top 10 hottest snowboarders.

Here is the hotty in action in Absinthe's Resonance:


But we're not here to objectify Cocard or watch him do his job, we're here for the fashion

 and this season the fashion wears 'Dinoflage' darlings


For any budding designers out there looking for camo inspiration this season here's a camouflage map of the world. Australia are the surprising losers, the runners up are Belgium, and Sweden, and the Democratic Republic of Congo takes the prize with a zesty leopard print.


Enough of this, feel free to go out and buy the new Whitelines 100 floppy book, browse through the snowboard gear porn, and help fund the next snowboard trip/jolly of those nice editor fellas.




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Zoo York Snowboards, the megacorporation and the ghost of Ed Hardy

September 18, 2014, 6:09 am
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Zoo York are the latest non-snowboard brand to try and break into this market, but unlike the recent successes by Nike and Adidas, Zoo York's efforts are a case study in how it shouldn't be done. This is how you don't learn from experience...


Let's go back to 2009/2010 and the travesty that was Ed Hardy's attempt to get into snowboarding. They started off with a range of generic branded-up snowboards...


But things took a spectacular turn for the douche with their incredible clothing line...



And their startling launch event...



Just one season later, after unsurprisingly miserable sales, they beat a hasty retreat, leaving swathes of overproduction in their wake, with snowboards still selling as new on Ebay years later.

Behind the Ed Hardy brand is Iconix Brand Group, a two billion dollar business who describe themselves as 'the world's premier brand management company'. What that means is that they are a leading exponent of buying troubled brands and then creatively rinsing every last cent out of them by allowing the brand to be plastered across any cheap crap that they can, before the brand dies a sad and protracted death.

Strangely, despite their epic Ed Hardy failure, someone at Iconix still has a taste for trying to grab a bit of the snowboarding pie and now they're throwing their keys back in the bowl.

Zoo York was founded in 1993, it was acquired by Marc Echo Enterprises (MEE) in 2001, and when MEE started to hit the skids in 2009 Iconix snapped up 51% of them, then 2013 they got hold of the rest of the company when MEE continued their downhill spiral.

So four years later and Zoo York is the next brand from the Iconix stable that's going to give snowboarding a try, and like Ed Hardy they're going to kick things off with a range of generic branded-up snowboards...

Although thankfully they've decided to steer well clear of producing a range of Tiger print jackets and budgie smugglers this time around.


I don't think anyone at Iconix is all that confident about the success of this project though and they've really not bet the house on this one. There's no sponsored riders, no videos, very little marketing, no social media, even the blog content on the site is just their skateboard news, and tellingly their snowboards are being built by a third party called Revolution. That sort of half-hearted approach stands very little chance of success and it's a wonder that they've bothered at all.

Another worrying sign for this latest attempt to break the market, is that this isn't even the first time Zoo York themselves have tried to edge their way into snowboarding. Back in 2004 they signed-up the then 14-year-old Luke Mitrani in an abortive attempt to expand into the footwear and casual wear market.


Still maybe between them all they'll be third time lucky. Except it isn't even the third time, there's one more example of snowboarding failure in the Iconix stable. Back in 2006 Iconix acquired yet another failing brand, Ocean Pacific (who knew they were still around?). Although primarily a surf brand, back in the late 80's and early 90's Op actually established a pretty serious foothold in snowboarding. They sponsored some of the biggest riders of the era including Damian Sanders, they funded some key events, they threw around the advertising dollars and they produced an epic range of eye-watering neon outerwear...

Diall 911, if you spot Damian Sanders dressed like a neon Guile about to Sonic Boom the shit out of a poor unsuspecting snowboarder.


Sanders in his pomp, styling out those hard boots, smothered in Op gear and branding.


Op sponsored events


Tight neon pants. It's going to be a long time until those two things coincide again.


How about this for a jacket.


Unfortunately in the mid 90's during one of Op's subsequent dips in fortune they pulled out of the sport and snowboarding's neon phase came to an abrupt and sadly missed halt.

But that was only after they creepily foretold of the eventual rise of the Flying Tomato


Today the only connection of the Op brand to snowboarding are some shitty licensed goggles that are available in Japan:




So now the zombie skateboard company of the zombie streetwear company of the zombie brand juggernaut are having their second attempt to break into a market where their zombie tattoo and zombie surf brand-mates have already failed. It's not going to be the epic failure that was Ed Hardy snowboards, but it's clearly not going to be the next big thing either. If anything it's just another sign of the continued demise of Zoo York as it joins OP and Ed Hardy as a brand that will only exist in the dustiest of discount store sale bins.

One last strange thing about this whole charade is that Iconix probably could have had a better shot at this if they had tried to resurrect the legacy of Op. They could could have focused on being the most awesomely neon snowboard company around, which at least would give them a real marketing difference (unlike Zoo York which is going toe to toe against Tech Nine in a fight that they will quickly and quietly lose). But even if they had tried with the best brand and the most unique positioning, the lack of investment or effort they're showing with the Zoo York entry would doom any approach to irrelevance

Better luck next time Iconix, maybe fifth time will be the charm.



Before you go, this is a good excuse to take a look at the excellent Powder and Rails episodes about Damian Sanders starring some of that awesome Op gear.





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The first edition of Whitelines - a glimpse into the snowboarding world of 1995

October 2, 2014, 6:45 am
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Now that we've saved Whitelines by taking the time explain to them why print is dead and what they need to do to save themselves, we figured the next thing we should do is critique the very first edition. We thought it might be interesting to see where it all went wrong, but what we found was a strange glimpse into a vaguely remembered part of our past...



If anyone wants to read the first post on Illict all you have to do is scroll to the bottom of the archives and you'll find a very strange story/lie about the invention of snowboarding. The internet is very convenient like that. For print though, things are a little bit trickier. It turns out that Whitelines don't actually have a copy of their first edition, having tossed it out in one of the frequent clean-outs they need to allow themselves to make more paper. Over the last twenty years nearly all of the copies of the first edition have gone missing for similar reasons throughout the country, but we were able to track down one well-loved and dog-eared copy of the October 1995 magazine. It was in the paws of a former pro snowboarder, Chris Moran from ACM. Here are some things we relearned about snowboarding in 1995.



1. It's not all that surprising Chris Moran kept a copy, he was all over it like a cheap suit. He featured in some way on twelve different pages including grabbing the first cover. It's essentially the Chris Moran fanzine by Whitelines. To be fair though, Chris was almost equalled in his magazine domination by just three other British riders; Stuart Brass, Danny Wheeler (who craftily garnered some extra coverage by also running a shop at the time) and the worlds greatest snowboarder - Steve Bailey.

Fun fact: Chris Moran actually found a way to ensure he got even more coverage a little while later when he became the editor of Whitelines and he still manages to keep his name in lights as a contributing writer. We are starting to suspect that Chris Moran only exists while Whitelines has his name in it. This magazine is to Chris Moran, what the Picture was to Dorian Gray.


2. 1995, the era of marshmallow shoes.

Some interesting retro insights into the spawny world of wannabe snowboarders Take That, just after they split-up, before they fully split-up, before they got back together, before they split-up again, twice.


3. Talking of footwear, before the age of quick internet fact checking, things like this used to happen...

Still, better than those bloody Nipe boots.



4. 90's era snowboards are getting snapped up left right and centre at the moment by rampant vintage snowboard traders. Amongst all the interesting finds in that market it's easy to forget that on the whole snowboard graphics in the 90's were incredibly plain and mostly absolute shit.

Here's a whole page of instantly forgettable snowboards.

This was a page from the very minimalist snowboard review section, just 5 cramped pages in the back of the magazine. Not at all like the 176 pages of fancy separate magazine that this has evolved into today.

Fun fact: There were 26 snowboard brands featured in that section (16 of which are now dead brands), which strangely enough is more than the 21 brands that appeared in this year's much larger mag.

Of the 150 snowboards featured in the 1995 edition, only four were in any way not dull:

The two on the left (Lib Tech's Doug Boy and Division 23's Peter Line model) are classic designs, the World Industries Winnie the Pooh is reminiscent of a simpler time when snowboarding really didn't give a shit about copyright and loved computer generated flames, and the board on the right from The Movement was just stand-out heinous. 


We did spot one great base graphic later on in the mag...





5. Classy captions








6. Like the snowboards, the snowboard gear ads were also universally bland, but some of the shop ads were so 1995 they were great:

90's cartoon characters, hand-drawn ads and illegible fonts - all ads should be like this.


Fun fact: Of the 35 shops who bought advertising space in the first edition of Whitelines, just one of those shops still exists (or is at least is called the same thing). If you ever inadvertently time-slip back into 1995, it's probably best not to invest in a British snowboard shop.



7. Back page ads featured snowboarders with soggy asses. You don't see that any more.





8. We lied a little. There was one interesting snowboard gear ad...

At least we think it's a gear ad, could be anything really.



9. Something all the ads were missing that looks really strange twenty years later - no websites or email addresses. You just had to phone them up, or write an actual letter to muddle your way through figuring out what the likes of Fishpaw were trying to flog you. And if you wanted to buy something, you just sent your credit card details in the mail.

Credit card fraud. That's where the real money is if you do ever inadvertently time-slip back into 1995.


100537.521@ Compuserve.com...What the hell are you supposed to do with that? 



10. 1995 snowboard events.

Minimalist halfpipes, shitty magazine graphics and a man in drag entering the women's event...


In the days before the Olympics things were a little different



'The World's Greatest Snowboarder' and another incredibly minimalist halfpipe at a different event.


And more men in drag

Snowboarding in drag must have been close compulsory 1995. I really don't remember that, but you can't argue with printed history.


and finally...

11. The most bonkers commercial link-up in snowboarding history


Even Shaun White hasn't managed to get near this record



If you want to know a little more about the early days of Whitelines I found this interesting piece about the first editor, 'Chod' Thomas, which is worth a read.




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The Death of Reef's Asspirational Marketing Strategy

October 9, 2014, 6:36 am
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Here's a little story about what happens when you build your brand based purely on the objectification of women...


In 1984 two Argentinian brothers Fernando and Santiago Aguerre started up a company making sandals. 

Fernando is the one dressed as a curtain

Then they had to find a way to flog those sandals, and the method they chose is proudly described by the company website:

"Inspired by the notoriously beautiful women of the beaches in South America, the brothers saw an opportunity to introduce the surf market to an exotic element that they called Miss Reef. Never revealing her face or identity, the brothers used the intrigue of Miss Reef to help convey their idea of the surf lifestyle." 

"Intrigue"

"The first advertisement involving Miss Reef was rejected from the surfing magazines for the controversial content, but after some convincing [money], the ads finally ran. The surfers who read the magazines were instantly intrigued by the exotic and beautiful figure in the ads. Since then, Miss Reef has become a global icon of the surfing community. She has remained an integral component of Reef's DNA, and can easily be attributed to the success of Reef."

And for almost 30 years they've continued to pursue a dedicated ass-focused marketing strategy.

Somewhere in the middle of that period Reef were all over snowboarding. This was one of the ads from the first edition of Whitelines we reviewed the other week.

Strangely they used shots of Jim Rippey from the front rather than focusing on his pert 'intrigue'. 


One of the things they also brought to snowboarding were their Miss Reef competitions. These weren't the sort of competitions which celebrate the snowboarding prowess of women, they were more the sort of competition where horny men judged women's arses...








Green guy was forced to hastily improvise to cover his impromptu boner


And they publicised those competitions and Reef, by lining up women in neat rows...









sometimes at a slightly different angle to break things up


sometimes the other side

sometimes in different tops


when the opportunity arose, in swimming pools


often with beer


frequently with beer, while being gawked at by a horde of guys

and in one particularly memorable occasion, in clown costumes?


Of course, Reef wanted to show that women could do more than just be judged for their pertness and standing in rows. Occasionally Reef girls were allowed to drape...




That was a little close, we almost saw their faces for a moment. There's a danger we could start treating them as individuals and not just "intregue" objects if that happened. 


That's better. Draped by the swimming pool


And all the poses combined. Almost the full range of skills the Miss Reef girls were expected to manage.

There was just one other skill, and this was the last Reef favourite, marching in formation up stairs.




Sadly for Reef, despite their best efforts to build a market in snowboarding based on the back(sides) of the Miss Reef girls, things didn't work out in the long-term and we don't see them round these hills any more.

It wasn't just snowboarding, even in their surf culture mainstay, their ability to use of women's arses to promote their brand has been tailing off. After thirty prolific years of Miss Reef photoshoots, calendars and competitions it seems like Reef are being forced to drop this bottom-feeding marketing strategy. Their last calendar was produced in 2013, the once proud Miss Reef section of their site has been quietly been dropped and all that is left is some of that old calendar content on their European site and a few sorry looking t-shirts no one is going to buy if they ever have any ambition of getting laid with an actual woman.

It was a marketing strategy with a few flaws right from the start; it alienated half of their potential market straight away and most of the rest of the market don't really want to wear a brand that makes them look like they're publicly celebrating soft-porn. Despite that there was a niche market that was a moneymaker for Reef for many years, but fatality in snowboarding and unhealthily elsewhere, time told for this dated approach as even the guys that used to love buying their product because they wanted to celebrate the butts of some unidentifiable women, have slowly realised it might be just slightly misogynistic.

So now Reef are forced to reinvent themselves and find a new way to market their brand, which won't be an easy job by any means and it's unlikely they'll ever work their way back into snowboarding. 


It's the (rear) end of a very strange era in marketing.


Of course, the alternative is that they could keep the strategy, and try out a new market. After all as we proved just a few months ago skiers are quantifiably arse men.



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/r/snowboarding - The biggest snowboard site you've probably never heard of and probably couldn't find even if you had

October 16, 2014, 5:11 am
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Somewhere within the baffling internet behemoth that is reddit there's a large and active community of snowboarders. We thought we'd find out what the hell was going on so we interviewed one of the 'mods' who goes by the moniker of david_z to find out more...




Reddit calls itself  'the front page of the internet' and it's probably a fair claim. It's homepage is constantly updated with the latest memes and it's the site that "inspires" most of stuff you'll find on sites like BuzzFeed, or Unofficial Networks a few hours later.

What's it's not though is welcoming and easy to use for first timers. Every once in a while we suddenly receive a huge spike in traffic from reddit and after several years of procrastination we decided it was about time that we finally tried to figure out what the hell was going on in there. After a number of hours of blundering through the unfamiliar depths of it we eventually found ourselves in the /r/snowboarding section where we almost immediately and inadvertently created a shit storm of anger about our flippant use of the word 'hipster'. Still, when people aren't being horrifically anti-semantic it was clear that this was a really active community of snowboarders with some really interesting stuff going on. But we're inherently lazy so rather than doing more homework ourselves, we decided to contact one of the moderators, david_z to get him to explain things...



Who are you and how long have you been a redditor/snowboarder?

My name is David Zemens. I started snowboarding a bit in maybe 1994 and bought my first board in 1996. There were a few years when I didn't really ride much, either it was an awful winter or more likely I was in college and was too busy drinking beer or whatever, but I've been riding for about 20 years give or take.  Which makes me feel old.

I've been on reddit apparently for 6 years. I would've guessed longer than that, though.  I started participating in the /r/snowboarding community probably in 2010.



Old man Zemens, his soul-patch double and his hoverboard



What does a reddit moderator do exactly and how is a moderator anointed? 

Mods are anointed by other mods. A long time ago I was apparently active enough or posted interesting enough stuff that the other mods thought I’d be a good mod and that’s that.

Basically mods just maintain the community, curate the user submissions, delete spam, and babysit internet fights, although thankfully snowboarders are usually pretty chill enough that we don’t worry much about the latter. Occasionally trying to steer the site in particular direction, or away from certain things.




What other sections of reddit to you use, other than The Fappening of course?

My lawyers have advised me not to discuss The Fappening.

I don’t do a lot of other stuff on Reddit any more. I used to participate in some of the politics groups, economics, etc., but all that shit just makes me mad. I have fairly radical political beliefs, so all that tends to do is upset me, and I don’t have enough hours in the day to fight with idiots on the internet. I'm a lot happier now that I spend (or waste, depending on who you ask) my time doing snowboarding stuff.

A happier Zemens and his teeth double



I hear that you are a big fan of pictures of people on ski lifts and pictures of snowboard boots. What's with that obsession?

Hahahah yeah that’s the memes.

So the “boot” thing came up like this. A few years ago someone snapped a cell phone pic, basically they sat down to strap in and took a pic looking down the hill. It’s basically a picture of their boots.  A boot selfie.  And they submit this picture to reddit like to say “Hey look at me I’m snowboarding”. 

Now you’ve got 40,000 people, most of whom snowboard 3 days a season and they all upvote stuff like this. It’s “me too!” content, copycat content. If one person does it, no big deal. But it never stops with just one.  You end up with 20 or 30 of these cluttering up the sub and it goes on for weeks. Seriously!

You want a good laugh go over to /r/longboarding and see the sort of pics that get played there. I don’t want /r/snowboarding to devolve in to that.


It's ironic really, because I was searching David's blog for accompanying pictures for this post and I was overwhelmed by this sort of thing...

His site is mostly gratuitous crotch shots.


You also have a blog, what's the thinking behind having all the different outlets?

I had been on reddit prior to starting my own blog at Agnarchy.com, so when I started my site back in 2009 or whenever it was, it was just natural for me to check out the /r/snowboarding. At the time, I think there were only a few hundred users, so it was still really small. I've never gone overboard on self-promotion, especially since I also moderate it, but like other social channels it can be a good way to share your content.

I’d love to have traffic like /r/snowboarding (100k uniques per month) on my own site that’s probably never going to happen, so my own site is just my forum for op/ed or my take on snowboarding current events, I do gear reviews, you know all the usual stuff.

Reddit is a place to just give back a little bit, I can find some new ideas for content but it’s also a place I can answer questions in a format that doesn't require writing an entire article, drafting copy, finding stock images, coming up with a headline that’s “viral” enough or SEO optimized, etc.

Blogging is a pain in the ass, in comparison...



Who are the most active or most interesting people on the snowboarding subreddit?

Not sure if these are the most active or interesting and I probably am not paying enough attention to usernames but a few always stick out. Phunkstar always posts good videos and has a knack for digging up old videos I think. Also super knowledgeable about snowboarding history. Bladepsycho is another mod, the newest mod since half of them don’t do shit anymore I added him to help out. Irahi, surflessinseattle are usually good. Chulksmack360 too, he posts his own videos which are pretty funny.


After literally some research, here are three of our favourite things from /r/snowboarding

Some lad getting lamped, submitted by manbearpig1204


Classic Shaun White Quote - submitted by Shredgod


And trending right now...


Scott Stevens spinning around all nicely - submitted by theRippedViking

If you want to take a look through the best rated posts on /r/snowboarding of all time, here's the link.



How does reddit compare/differ from the dedicated snowboard forums? 

The layout and functionality is different from most, it’s very 'democratic' in the way that what rises to the top is the content that people have voted up. This is really neat because someone with deep pockets like a Burton or Transworld can’t just come in with a big ad spend and bump everyone else’s content to the bottom of the feed.

And it’s a great way to share or promote content like your crew’s videos or a set of stills that your photog friend snapped during last week’s rail mission, or hell even to help answer questions for some n00bs who are just getting in to snowboarding.

I think part of what draws people to /r/snowboarding is that you are someone who snowboards – maybe a lot or maybe a little – but you’re already on reddit and subscribing to other interests, whether it is funny GIFs, or Python or smoking bowls or snowboarding, with reddit you get it all in one place. But as a result of this I think the population on forums tends more enthusiast, whereas reddit maybe more novice.




Why would people use reddit rather than a forum?

Reddit is like a super-forum. There’s sub-communities or sub-reddits for any topic you can think of, even The Fappening.

One thing that reddit does pretty well is crowdsourcing information.  Last year (which reminds me I have to update some of these…) we started a crowd-sourced travel guide where people can post a review of any resort and then it’s easy for you to find out information. It’s sourcing that information and collecting it all in one place.  Forums can do this too but sometimes forums languish, or the threaded nature of them devolves in to something else, here we can keep it focused pretty tightly and sidebar any real interesting contributions.



At the moment the snowboarding sub, like the snowboarding forums, has an abundance of questions from people who are just getting into snowboarding. What could it offer to more experienced/addicted snowboarders?

I’ve always wanted it to be a place that doesn't alienate the novice riders but also provides value to the more experienced riders without being elitist about it.

There’s a lot of traffic on this sub that’s pretty much untapped right now and it would be great to involve other industry people.  

One thing I was able to finagle somehow, and we’ve done it twice now, is that we had an open forum with Dave Lee from Signal Snowboards. He came on for a few hours to do a Q&A [It's called an 'Ask Me Anything' (AMA) on the reddit]. People were totally stoked on that. I can’t thank him enough for doing that.  I wish we could get more “insiders” involved like that.

I still want to see more original user pics, vids, hell even stories would be cool. 





Who else would you want for an AMA? If someone wanted to offer themselves as an AMA how do they get involved? 

This comes up sometimes. I think obviously the riders right now that people get really stoked on would be huge: Scott Stevens comes to mind. Halldòr, naturally. I would like to see maybe Danny Davis and I’ve heard some other people mention that one, too. I’d love to see some more female involvement too, there’s chicks out there killing it, Jess Kimura or Danyale Patterson, or maybe that Czech girl whose helmet exploded in the Olympics would be cool perspective to have. It’s not just men in snowboarding even though it seems like that sometimes.

Any iconic riders would be sick to have, too, someone like a Jussi who just retired or Jamie Lynn or Terje, Peter Line is usually good for some laughs… there’s interest in those “old” guys although probably not as much as for the younger, more active riders.

Basically that's anyone. If you are snowboarding-famous please give it a go and contact David



How the fuck do you actually use this site? It's easily the hardest site to get involved in. What would be your tips and advice to help other get involved?

Reddit? It is basically a crowd-sourced aggregator. Users submit and vote on content, higher scores get more visibility, lower scores kinda disappear.

How to use it is a little trickier... and this is probably good advice for any community: spend some time – a few days or a week or whatever just getting the lay of the land.

Getting involved, just ask questions, answer questions, start discussion topics, post anything that you think is interesting. Sometimes you’ll post something that you think is tits, but nobody cares, or the dumbest thing rises to the top. Don’t fret about internet points and don’t take it too personally if something you submitted doesn’t get a ton of upvotes. They are not convertible to currency and are of no use to you in the real world.


The /r/snowboarding (aka Shreddit) icon



And finally, what is your vision for the future of the Shreddit sub?

It would be rad if videos showed up FIRST on /r/snowboarding, like if this site would become the place to find the latest vids.  This probably wouldn’t extend to exclusive premieres or pro full parts, but the mags all share a lot of “amateur” rider parts or crew videos that they’ve found by scouring the internet. I’d love to see people submitting all of their videos to reddit, first, like that would be the place to submit your video immediately after you uploaded it to Youtube.

More involvement from brands and personalities would be great, too. Like I said there’s 45,000 people there with a self-professed interest in snowboarding, and it’s something like 100,000 unique pageviews per month, during the winter season. That’s pretty considerable air time, and it’s free, if you do it right.

I think these things in particular would help make it a bit more relevant to the more “core” snowboard crowd. Even if you don’t want to help out on advice threads, everyone gets stoked for video parts and interacting with pros and industry insiders.



I think with that, David 'The Crotch' Zemens, has hit the nail on the head. If you've got a video to post, fancy doing an AMA, want to argue about the definition of the word 'hipster', or you just want to have a lurk then this is where you can find it.






Photo from the title is by shiznifterflifen



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David's blog - Agnarchy. It's a bit like this one, but lazier.

Gary Harbon, from Carmarthen, built a snowboard, out of carbon.



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Ruroc Now Sell Magic Snowboards!

October 23, 2014, 5:02 am
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The most inexplicable brand in snowboarding is back with another questionable product...

In our most recent Whitelines article we took an in-depth look at the entirely vapid topic of British snowboarding celebrities. One of the results from that scientific experiment is that we found that Simon Pegg is one of Britain's biggest snowboarding celebrities. A great snowboarding celebrity for the UK to have, the only downside being his strange penchant for wearing Ruroc helmets. We'd always given him the benefit of the doubt and assumed that he wore them to enjoy some brief moments of celebrity anonymity (it was the only reason we could think of for anyone to wear one).

Actual picture of Simon Pegg

But it seems Simon Pegg might actually be sponsored by Ruroc, he could well be their entire sponsored snowboarding team, and now they're now also supplying his snowboards. This tweet just popped up in my Twitter feed.


The 'Viper Cascade' snowboard. How about that for some classic 90's snowboard naming. Snake Avalanche! 

I visited the Ruroc site to find out more and was directed by their homepage to a review on the Natives site. The Natives article features a video of a man you can't hear, who doesn't do any snowboarding...


But sensing that was a pointless exercise, they've also provided a written review which starts off by saying; "A real nice all-mountain board, solid enough to handle deep pow". You really have to question how the fuck they know that from riding it in a dome, but they're really adamant about its powder riding abilities because later they talk more about it remaining "really responsive in deeper snow or when venturing off piste due to the carbon compression running through the whole body".

It sound suspiciously like they're just making this shit up and seeing as the reviewer isn't the world's greatest snowboarder I'm not sure anyone should really take this at all seriously even if it was somehow tested properly.

So none the wiser I went back to the Ruroc site to take a look at what they had to say, and unfortunately it was mostly jargony bullshit...

"The legend continues. First Ruroc revolutionised helmets, now we're moving from head to toe into the world's first never wax snowboard! These True Twin Snowboards not only never need waxing they also outstrip the top snowboards made by some of the biggest brands across the world! With Carbon Compression Couplings, 3AX Fibres™,  TES Structure™, Razor Rockwell 48 edges, Isosport Sintered 7700 base, Mirrored wood core and a Stone Ground Base you'll wish you could have ridden Ruroc all along!"

A never wax snowboard, interesting, how does that work?

"This combined with a product that can't be named protects your base from the need to wax!"

Oh, magic then. Sounds legit, count me in, here's my £380.

They've got two shapes of snowboards each available in two different mouthwash colours and strangely they all have the same specification.

Here's their only promotional video, which like the Natives review also includes an impressive lack of snowboarding...


This was the most interesting thing about the video...

:|


A snowboard that doesn't need waxing sounds like a really interesting idea, but if Ruroc have really developed that you'd hope that they could show a little more proof by the time it comes to selling production versions. If nothing else, it would significantly improve their ability to sell more of them so there's a big incentive for them to do simple things like; run comparison tests with other snowboard bases, share some insight into the development process, allow some serious snowboarders test them out, or tell people how long it will last and guarantee their new invention. The lack of these things, or any other proof they could have supplied, really is strange and it makes us question the claims they're making.


So here are the 5 things we've learned from this situation:

1. Somehow Ruroc are selling enough silly helmets that they're not only still in business, but they've got enough leftover cash to branch out.

2. They're investing that cash in a famous millionaire and some magic snowboards.

3. They can't tell you how the magic snowboards work, there's no proof and there's no mention of any sort of guarantee, so you're going to have to hand over your £380 and trust Ruroc.

4. You'll be trusting a snowboard company where the official spokespeople are quite happy to announce publicly that they have quit snowboarding.

5. And finally you'll also have to trust a company that we caught telling magnificent porky pies just a few months ago. Here was the lie and here was the second lie to excuse the first lie.





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The final article from Misplaced Person which was a charming rant on the decline of Natives and coincidentally also included a link between Ruroc and Natives.

Honest Snowboard Brand Slogans

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The 12 Best eBay CRAZY SKI HATS!

October 28, 2014, 7:00 am
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eBay now have a specific section of their site called 'Crazy Ski Hats'. It was our destiny to find out more...

Just in time for the release of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie the crazy hat manufacturers have managed to churn out some copyrightastic balaclavas.

MICHELANGELO - FACE MASK Winter Ski Balaclava Knit Beanie Hat Crazy Cool FUNNY

Q. Why didn't they cut the eye holes to match the pattern? 
A: Because they're CRAZY!



The first rule of selling crazy hat's through eBay: Crazy Hat sellers FUCKING LOVE CAPITALS!


CRAZY DUCK BRAND MUSTARD/GREY HANGING POM WINTER SKI/BOARD BEANIE HAT

Hat plunged down over model head to provide no useful sizing information at all. 



Beard Head Beardhead Pink Bunny Crazy Ski Snowboard Hat Cap Stash

Beard masks, crap at the best of times, but they truly make no sense if they're pink. It just looks like you've inserted your head into a Barbie's stroller.



American Eagles Outfitters NEW Blue Ski Cap Winter Hat Beanie Knit #CRAZY Hat


Hash tag wanker



100% Wool Nepal Winter Crazy Monkey Animal Fleece Lined Beanie Ski Cap Hat Rasta

Monkey? Looks like a the result of that one-night stand between an roofied zebra and Bert from Sesame Street.




Mental Gear Funky Crazy Fleece Ski & Snowboard - Youth HAT - Igloo Ice House

Just in case having an igloo on your head didn't make things clear, we've added a badge to alert people to avoid you like West Africa.



Mental Gear Funky Crazy Fleece Ski & Snowboard~HAT~Colored Balls Jester~FUNKY

Only useful if you're a paedophile stalking a ball pit.



CRAZY Ski cap Beanie Motorcycle Helmet hat handknit Llama wool handspun yarn

An incredible case of over-selling and under-delivering. Not only is it the exact opposite of 'CRAZY', it's also completely non-functional as a hat. Here's another angle....

It's just an itchy head doily. 


Let's get back to crazy, and it's doesn't get any more crazy than this...

Old Germany Snowman on Skis with Crazy Hat Christmas Candy Container

Not a hat, but being eBay any old shit pops up in every category, and this time we got this bowel-looseningly terrifying doll.

It's main interactive play feature is the withered-arm Nazi salute.


Mental Gear Ski & Snowboard - Crazy Fleece Adult HAT - Hellraiser - Red

This is just one example of the immense range of hats you can buy with dildos all over them.



C401 crazy animal adult kids ear flap fleece lined wool cute hat Ski Cap Nepal

It's a green reindeer with eyes in it's ears.


Mental Gear Crazy Funky Ski & Snowboard - Adult HAT - Chomp Shark Fish - Yellow

The main problem with this is that it looks nothing like a shark, so you'll be constantly required to explain the meaning of your really shitty hat to people, only to have to experience their disappointment and disdain directly to your face, rather than the usual comfort of having those truly uncomfortable reactions happen behind your back.




Buy the silly hat or the crazy lady will STAB YOUR FUCKING EYES OUT!



If you fancy buying a hat in preparation for a season of being beaten up at random, here's the Crazy Ski Hat page. Other similar pages also worth checking out are the Mental Hat page, the Jester Hat collection and the bemusing Mohawk Beanie range.


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Search

When Thrasher Magazine Did Snowboarding

October 30, 2014, 7:49 am
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Some poor intern at Thrasher Magazine has been busy scanning every page of every back issue and uploading it onto the internet. That's an incredible administrative feat from a very unlikely source. Good thing for us though is that we can now see the brief period when skateboarders thought snowboarding was cool. Here are all the interesting appearances of snowboarding in Thrasher...

Well probably not all, because we've got no interns here so we may have missed a few. With that admission out the way, here's a graph of the number of editions of Thrasher (that we found) which featured snowboarding in some way which accurately(ish) charts the exact(ish) amount of shits that skateboarders gave about snowboarding over time...



Let's take a look at the best bits.


The first appearance we found was this advert/review of a Slicker snowboard/snurfer in the November 1982 edition...

(click on the images to embiggen them)


December 1982. The next month Slicker were back and throwing some advertising budget at the mag, apparently advertising the Slicker as some sort of penis enhancement product.



January 1983 saw the first proper article about snowboarding.

"Hey, wait a minute. What's this? This ain't skateboarding."


November 1983 and now a bunch of other snowboarding companies also started to advertise...

That penis enhancement approach again


Flight's sponsored rider was the perfectly named - Lance Mountain.


"When it comes down to WINNING, Tom Sims dominates snowboarding."

"Only SIMS boards have stainless steel thrusters and other steel edges." Steel thrusters? Where do I get a set of those bad boys for my snowboard. 



January 1984 Snowtech produces the world's dullest snowboard advert.




January 1985 Burton and the slinky onesies



November 1985 and somehow Burton suits get even tighter 

and also they've introduced some sort of  cock leash. Looks painful


November 1986 and now we've got four pages and we're in colour.





May 1988 Snowboarding's first and only Thrasher cover marks the point that snowboarding went from obscure to really getting a lot of coverage. In this edition there was also a six-page article inside the mag. (click on the date if you want to see that).

That's Rob Roskopp who was a pro for Santa Cruz skateboards.


January 1989 Colour hit the inside of Thrasher just in time for the neon era of snowboarding...

Terry Kidwell


Damian Sanders 


George Pappas


A snowboard brand that must of only existed for all of five minutes in 1989


And some old bearded fella.
Please also take note of the skateboarder on the far right.


February 1989 Another four page article.

Note the abundance of silver duct tape.


April 1989 A six page article on the including interviews with Craig Kelly and Shaun Plamer (click on the date to see the full thing)





July 1989 nice Burton ad.




November 1989 Craig Kelly's camp got four pages



Bert Lamar gets the contents page


And an add for Look snowboards


and Kemper opted for the most straight-forward ad message ever



Decmber 1989 A five page article...

Which starred George Pappas' impressively hirsute belly


and an ad featuring Noah Salasnek, who it turns out was the inspiration for Shaun White's entire look.



January 1990 A whole load of snowboard ads, but I particularly like this cartoon cautionary tale.




February 1990 and six more pages of snowboard promotion.



Which included this picture of a snowboarding David Hasselhof


Classic Damian Sanders bedecked in Ocean Pacific


And a bloke in a thong


November 1990 A listicle article raging against the recent over-commercialisation of snowboarding. It's basically all today's internet articles in just four pages.

"Snowboarding has crossed international borders, transcended seasonal barriers, cracked the big resorts, garnished mass media exposure and been commercialized, incorporated and bastardized."





December 1990 Burton ad featuring a neon Karate Kid




February 1991 An article looking at the controversial new concept of the "snowboard park". Do snowboarders really need it and is it just a way to segregate snowboarders?




Also another set of awesome 90s snowboard shop cartoons



December 1991 Snowboarding gives something back to skateboarding




November 1992 A strange article about snowboarding adopting skateboard tricks. It's hard to get the point of it because it's both pro and anti snowboarding in some ways, but it seems it's mostly raging against the renaming of skateboarding tricks by snowboarders and it does seem to indicate a shift in Thrasher's interest in snowboarding.

"Without skateboarding, snowboarders wouldn't have jack."




Followed by an interview with Craig Kelly.

The picture on the bopttom right is Craig and Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys


December 1993 A year later and it's a similar point introducing an interview with Jeff Brushie 

"Tricks that were born on the streets, ramps and bowls of the world have been taken from skateboarding and bastardized into the snowboarding vocabulary. Some have risen to stellar heights and others have slumped to hideous lows. Sno pro extraordinaire Jeff Brushie explains..."


A new album by Hootie and the Blowfish on the right there


From that point on snowboarding turned into a regular two-page column called Cold Snap (you can see them all here). Although the coverage was steady for a while here it was minimal and formulaic and we can't find any stand-out interesting articles or ads from December 1993 onwards.


June 1997 This interview with some lad called Greg Goulet was the last appearance of snowboarding we could find, but it the back issues of Thrasher aren't so detailed from about this period onwards so there could have been others.

This sequence was directed M. Night Shyamalan


And there you have it. Snowboarding had it's moment on the front page and generated a whole lot of interest for a while, but it was eventually relegated to the back pages, before being quietly dropped. Along the way though they managed to capture lots of interesting moments and if you fancy having a browse though their impressive archives here's the link.



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The first edition of Whitelines - a glimpse into the snowboarding world of 1995

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The Lost World of Snowbaord

November 6, 2014, 6:40 am
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The one thing that's had the largest effect on snowboarding in the last few years has been the rise of the internet. By that, what I mean is the rise of the internet and it's keyboard-mashing hordes has directly effected the word 'snowboard'. Never before has one word been spelled so many different ways by so many different people. Today we take a look at what happens to some of those sad misspelled snowboards after they are launched from Twitter into the unwelcoming abyss of the interweb...


Here's where we found that picture we shared on the Twitter and Facebook the other day. Just one dropped 'r' and this great picture was almost lost for all time before we were lucky enough to be able to rescue it...


Question:

Answer: Nothing


The rare sight of a wild snowbaord before it was tamed into becoming just another snowboard.




Correct



We've got a Celebrity Snowboader - It's former professional footballer... 



& and a Celebrity Snowbaorder - It's former Red Dwarf robot...




This is a section we'd like to call: People who should know better...

Looking forward to seeing Signal make a Snowbaord next Every Third Thursday. Toughest challenge yet.


These guys got a little bit needy with their attempts to get some extra coverage. Sadly their spelling didn't improve and the great Shaun White wasn't able to give his seal of approval.


£169 to learn to snowbaord with the added benefit of being the only person on earth to master it.



Too fucked-up on energy drinks to spell.


Pictured: A man snowbaording


There were no winners


Who went to the Snowboad Expo?


#snowboar has a lot of fans...





And finally there's these guys

No surprise they got it wrong. What a bunch of cnuts.




And that's Twitter done. Next time we'll take a look at the rest of the internet, then of course, there's this guy's whole life...


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Where Are Snowboards Really Made? Illicit Investigates...

November 13, 2014, 7:16 am
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Strange fact: The majority of snowboards are not built by the snowboard brands. That's something most snowboarders aren't aware of and most of the companies keep very quiet about. It's all about as transparent as an internal FIFA inquiry, so we thought we'd try and figure out exactly what's going on and shed some light on it...


Over the past few weeks we've been hacking away in the depths of the internet and interrogating industry insiders to try and build up an accurate picture of what is really happening, who actually builds the snowboards and where are they made.Here's what we found.




The things we learned along the way


What are these factories?

Most snowboards are not made by the snowboard brands we're all familiar with, they are often built by completely separate companies known in the business as Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM).



Why you probably haven't heard of these OEMs before

Most people will never known that their board was made by an OEM. The OEM will not leave their name on the product, OEMs have no interest in promoting themselves to the public because they don't sell directly and in most cases the OEMs are contractually obliged not to publicise the brands they are working with.

Having their boards produced by an OEM is not something most snowboard brands want to make a big deal about either. There's a stigma to not producing your own boards which means that even the big brands using these methods are reticent to tell people about it.

As it's not in the interest of either the OEM or brand to be transparent about their relationship it's really difficult to find this information. There may be some errors in our list as a result, despite the amount of digging we've done to get this far.



It gets complicated

To complicate things a little further, some brands can use more than one OEM to produce their boards. They can use one OEM for high-quality boards and one for low-quality.

Some brands may have a small factory of their own (which they'll proudly tell you about), where they produce the high-end boards, but their mass market boards are then produced by an OEM (which they won't really mention).

Brands can shift production from one OEM to another within weeks. This happens surprisingly often and it makes it difficult to track accurately.

One reason for the frequent shifts is that OEM factories work on small margins and are very susceptible to going out of business when they hit financial difficulties. For example, the Elan OEM factory in Austria used to be one of the world's biggest manufacturer of snowboards until they went went bankrupt in 2013.  At the time they were producing snowboards for the likes of, Arbor, Apo, Amplid, Bataleon, CAPiTA, Dinosaurs Will Die, Lobster and Rome. Most snowboarders didn't even notice the loss of Elan, because those brands were able to quickly source other OEMS with limited or no impact on their production.

Another reason for the quick moves between OEMs is that some brands own the machinery the factories use, which allows them to shift to another lower bidding provider even quicker.



Using an OEM is not necessarily bad 

Snowboard companies are experts at designing snowboards but manufacturing is another skill. The really good snowboard OEM factories can be much more efficient and produce a consistently higher quality of product than one run by a non-specialised company. It's the same reason why the snowboard brands use shipping companies to distribute their boards rather than doing it themselves.

To produce quality snowboards on any sort of significant scale you've really got no choice but to use a specialist. That's why all the biggest snowboard brands use OEMs.



Using an OEM badly can be terrible.

What gives OEM a bad name, and why there is a stigma associated with it, is what happens at the other end of the scale. There are a number of smaller brands or zombie brands who take no part in the design or development of the snowboards. They just order off-the-shelf designs from the OEMs with their logos added. They are only really graphics companies masquerading as snowboard companies and it's in the interest of those brands to hide their relationships with OEMs. Unfortunately while the legitimate companies also lack transparency it allows these shonky brands to blend in with the masses tarring the whole lot and making it very difficult for snowboarders to aviod them.



Building it yourself is not necessarily good.

Because some OEM/brand set-ups can be so bad, any company that makes it's own boards will use that as their main selling point. However just like there's a huge range of quality in OEMs there's a huge range of quality in self-build too. It's not as simple as saying if you build it yourself it's better. Some of these brands will be producing very high quality boards but others can just be a geezer in a garage, using a vacuum press, producing crappy snowboards and offering no warranty.



Made in China isn't the problem

There's always a lot of discussion about the quality of snowboards being made in China, and how this should be the thing to avoid.  However, just like any other country Chinese built snowboards can also be really bad or very good. Here's the guy that runs Endeavour talking about how they work:


It would be nice and simple if something like 'Made in America' could be used to signify a quality boards, but again it's a range. The companies featured in this chart that build in the US do produce quality boards, but there many other brands built badly in the US either by the brand or by US based OEMs. We've covered this before in our story '11 Brands, 1 Snowboard (and a $270 price difference)'

There doesn't seem to be a lot of correlation between the country the snowboard is made and the quality of the product.



Transparency seems to be the clearest way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The more transparent the brand is about how their boards are produced, the better the quality of snowboard you'll get.

Jones snowboards are a good example of how this can be done. Like a lot of other companies they've chosen to have their boards built by an OEM in Austria, but unusually they've decided to be honest about it. They can produce a better quality board in a more sustainable way using this method than they could by building it themselves. There is a page on their website that clearly explains some of their reasoning for that decision. They could even have gone further to share more about the development process and how GST works and they wouldn't go wrong. Instead of being punished for Jeremy Jones not personally constructing each board by hand, or for him not building them in his home town, people recognise the open and reasoned approach of that company and and it's growing rapidly.

There are brands that produce good snowboards that aren't transparent (yet), but there are no brands that produce shit snowboards that are transparent (or ever will be).





Some more on those unfamiliar names

GST (Global Sports Technologies GmbH) based in Antiesenhofen, Austria

CAPiTA MFG (C4future GmbH) based in Furnitz, Austria. CAPiTA acquired the old Elan factory and the brands are in the process of returning. 

Burton OEM  An unknown company based in Innsbruck, Austria. Burton have an agreement with their partner that they have to exclusively produce Burton boards. The last people Burton worked with in Poland couldn't make enough money from only supplying Burton and lost the business as a result.

Amer Sports  The corporation that owns Salomon along with a number of other companies, has a number of factories around Europe and Asia. There's more about them in the Faceless Corporations link at the bottom of this article.

Swiss Lab Factory Part of the Nidecker Group. Nidecker's manufacturing arm hit troubles a few years ago, they closed the Tunisian factory they had and the Swiss factory has now been split out as a separate company. Nidecker also owns or part-owns Jones, YES and Slash but those brands have not been forced to used the same OEM.

NBL Sport (Nobile) These are the guys that used to make Burton boards. 

Unknown Doesn't matter how much research you do, some of the things that go on in China stay in China. 


SWS (Solico Winter Sport) was set-up in Dubai by a couple of guys that used to work in the Elan factory. There's an interesting interview with them here. 

Mervin The name of the company that owns both the Lib Tech and GNU brands.

Meditec  The old factory Nidecker used to have in Tunisia. They only have a Facebook page featuring a few photos of naked women. Posters of naked women are the universal wall paper of snowboard factories. 


Edit: StepChild is Canadian, not based in the US.

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Coroflot and the world of tomorrow snowboarding

November 27, 2014, 6:34 am
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Coroflot is a site for budding designers/creatives to publish their portfolios in the hope of attracting a job. There's some good stuff on there and some very strange stuff, so this week we trawled through it to find the 10 most interesting snowboarding projects. Welcome to the future my friends...



10. Kristal Snowboard


The Kristal Snowboard might just be Mexico's first contribution to snowboard design.

It's ideal for seedy crotch voyeurs 

The see-through snowboard idea might have been done before, but what makes this one different is that it comes with a kick stand/awesome spoiler.

This might just be Mexico's last contribution to snowboard design



9. SNO GO


An idea for a motorised track that bolts on to a standard snowboard. It comes complete with a already defeatist product name, and an incredibly complicated power glove

Which is controlled by motherfucking rock!

The tracks are folded away during descents, but give it the sign of the horns and the tracks will pop-out and back up the hill you go. Advertised anti-gravity capabilities are still at the prototype stage.



8. LUG

Turns your snowboard into a disappointing suitcase.

"LUG Snowboard Transportation - A passion-driven project from years of personal experience snowboarding around the world. This Patent Pending product aids with instant snowboard transportation by increasing comfort, reducing muscular pains and reclaiming vital energy expended, allowing a rider to do more."

It's just a plastic handle.



7. Adjustable Snowboard Helmet


We've seen similar helmet ideas before and it always seemed a good idea to me.

If someone can get it to look less twatish


Some of the earlier versions actually looked a lot more promising...




6. Reaper Goggles


"Ideations - Because of the nature of the market, early ideation sketches explore various wild and bizarre ideas for eyewear. The goal was to try and push the limits to where eyewear can go and seek out the most marketable and sellable designs for the considered market."


We're already into negative marks for the use of the word 'ideations', then comes the pay-off of the finished product...



"Skullz Snowboard Goggles - The first concept are snowboard goggles mimicking the look of a human skull. Initial sketches were literal interpretations of a skull turned into goggles. However, several variations led to a more refined design which takes certain characteristics of the skull to give the goggles a skeletal and bonelike appearance. These goggles are designed to appeal to the crazy wild extreme sports segment of the market."

Warning: lack of peripheral vision could result in accident, as could looking like a massive bellend.



5. Avalanche - Snowboard Ultimate Vehicle



I'm never too sure about anything called 'avalanche', but it does have some nifty underseat snowboard boot storage.




4. World's Most Boring Bookself

How about this for some alternative camber

"World's Most Boring Bookshelf - Hand Modified snowboard bookshelf. Takes snowboarding to the ultimate low.... reading."

A surprising thing to develop, considering the guy so clearly hates reading.

Which might explain why it makes for a really shit bookself after all



3. Snowbike

300 hours of work went into building this massively over-engineered worse-than-a-snowboard concept. Looks pretty though.



2. Sno-Trax 



It's a robotic snow vehicle.



Robotic vehicles would be bloody ace. Of course it would probably need some sort of engine and associated mechanisms, which this design seems suspiciously light on.

The best bit though, is clearly the phallic logo,




1. Snowboard Resume

This lad just painted an old snowboard white, stuck his resume on it and sent it to Burton. 

I'm going to guess he didn't get the job.



You Might Also Like...

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - The industrial design future of snowboarding according to Behance

The Future of Snowboard Helmets


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Rants From The Mountain - The Vilest Snowboard Book Ever Written

April 8, 2014, 6:51 am
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A few weeks ago I reviewed two self-published books, one was great, the other incredibly dull, but as I mentioned I had planned to review three. This week we deal with that third book - Rants From The Mountain by Allan Saro. It's pitched as being a mix of advice for beginner snowboarders/skiers, a behind-the-scenes look at lift operations and the story of Allan Saro's season. That's what was promised, but what was delivered was something entirely different...


The first time I experienced a prostate orgasm was at four o'clock in the morning, in my apartment in Orange County, New York. 

That's the first line of the book, and like any standard advice book for beginner snowboarders/skiers, it starts with an anecdote about him having a strap-on up his ass. Now this could have gone one of two ways; he could have managed to strike the delicate balance between crudity, insight and emotion that Belle de Neige did in her excellent book, or he could have taken the route that nobody could possibly want. Unfortunately he chose route two, and the results are horrific.


----------------------------------------
WARNING: Just so you are under no illusion, every quote from this book is incredibly offensive. This is the point to step away if you don't want that sort of thing in your life.
----------------------------------------


After the initial reminiscences about anal sex, he swerved into some standard advice for beginner snowboarders/skiers, covering off a the topics of what to wear and when to go. Then just six pages in, we get to the sub-section 'Snowboarding vs. Skiing'. Now, I don't know what you'd be expecting to read when you start a section with that title, but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't expect it to be about Allan Saro having unprotected sex with an underage girl. Sadly, that's exactly what it is...

I had fucked strippers, models, women twice my age, many seventeen-year-olds, even my twenty-five-year-old bio teacher when I was in the ninth grade. But this? This was an entirely different level. If I got busted for this, I wouldn't be yelled at, have my hours cut, or even get fired. I would go to fucking prison - not jail, where you work out and make a few friends, but prison. I would be getting slammed in the ass by serious criminals who look at a pathetically delicate white boy like me as fresh meat. But them, that's what being an American is all about. It's about taking changes and living the spirit of entrepreneurialism. I saw an opportunity and rolled the dice. in a way, by having sex with that young woman, I was helping not only our economy but the true spirit of America.

I'm not from the US, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm very sure he's horribly misunderstood the key aspects of the American dream. As if all of that wasn't quite heinous enough, he ploughed on...

I didn't care if Ski Patrol was about to walk in on us, if the next liftee was pounding on the door, or if a little kid was being trampled to death by the chairs, this shit was going down. Four minutes before the next liftee was due up to relieve me I pulled my cock out of Dylan and painted the state of Hawaii on her tanned stomach.

Clearly, by this point Allan Saro still felt like these few pages didn't vehemently insult quite every moral and belief of the Western world, so he then thought it would be a good opportunity to have a pop at it's predominant religion while also clarifying that he's fully aware of how wrong his actions are...

I'd like to think there was an angel there looking out for me, keeping me safe. I don't know a lot about Christianity, but from what news headlines I've read, they sure do seem good at covering up child molestation, so I'd like to think maybe God had a special plan for me that day.

Grim



By page 29 he'd moved on to explain how you can steal snowboard and ski gear, but he still managed to make that section worse by taking the time to regale us with a little more unwanted insight into his views on children.

I was due back at my station half and hour ago, but I thought it was best I stayed put to keep a watchful eye. (Also to finish rubbing one out, but some old douche-bag walked by my car before I could cum.) Now I would have to wait for another scantily dressed preteen to run by with her neglectful, equally scantily clad mother.
(Yeah that's right. Grown men fantasize about having sex with your little girl. Think it's fucked up? Stop letting them dress like prostitutes and grown women, you fucking asshole. ... You're a disgusting piece of shit for allowing your daughter to dress like that.)

After horrifically misreading how everyone else thinks, he continues his quest to be the most repugnant man in snowboarding history...

After a month of being there, the job was starting to kill me, I had to work in brutal conditions (usually while high), for shit pay. The owner was onto me and breathing down my neck, desperate to fire me, but what I discovered next made it all worthwhile. I finally found my personal honey pot. I found a veritable assembly line of young girls, on that I would savagely harvest. Doing more drugs and underage girls in a span of five weeks than my entire life up to that point.

Mind you, I would be subtle. I've watched enough 'Dateline: to Catch A Predator' specials to know how to ride the fine line. I had a very delicate system.

Seriously Allan, Dateline; To Catch A Predator is not a fucking how-to-guide.


He then cracked on to some kid in the lift queue:

That is why you should never leave your child unattended on the mountain. Not only can they get hurt, but also fucked. I'm not sure what's worse, knowing your child is in a hospital bed somewhere or knowing she's in my bed somewhere. A little parenting goes a long way.

What's worse Allan, is you.


Chapter 4: Parenting

Good god, he's got a chapter where he has the gall to hand out parenting advice, and by now you should know where this is heading. By the end of this chapter he's had sex with another underage girl after dosing her up on E, weed and alcohol and we get this rotten story about him trying to get her out of his apartment before another girl turns up...

I hated it when girls couldn't get the hint. Don't get me wrong, Rachel was gorgeous, and I had a great time railing her. She was one of the few girls that could make me cum hard without letting me fuck her in the ass.

Rachel also wouldn't shut the fuck up. The sound of her vomiting was getting on my nerves.

It was quiet as we walked out into the parking lot. I reached my hand down her shirt and gave her a passionate kiss. 
"You're incredible," I said.
"You too," she said with a smile. "Sorry I don't have my license yet, I'll get it soon enough."
"It's okay, cowgirl," I replied. "How long until you get it?"
"Soon!" she said enthusiastically. "I turn sixteen next month and my road test is scheduled the week after!"
"Great, be good," I said as I slammed the door of my Subaru and drove around the block to check my email.

And he proceeds to give precisely no shits about that bit of news.

She is fifteen-years-old. Fifteen! She is fucking fifteen Allan!


After several months of being shit at his job and being an absolutely repellent human being, Allan still somehow expects the reader to feel sorry for him because his job was slightly difficult. Eventually he decides to quit and like any unbalanced individual he figures the best way to do this is the following:

I started going through each room, each desk, each drawer, trying to find anything of Bella's that I could steal. There were personal lady items throughout. I grabbed one particularly intimate piece that I won't mention in fear of her reading this and pressing charges. I instantly got hard.

I pulled down all three layers of pants and my underwear. My bare ass sat on her comfy desk chair and I started furiously jerking off. With the smell of her tit sweat, and the fantasy of her catching me only to help me finish, I popped all over her computer desk and my hands.

He then then smears his seamen over "everything that people would touch", including three keyboards, the doorknobs, his boss's chair and her personal belongings. Finally he steals some valuables and makes his exit...

As I stormed out, I gawked at a little girl and her mother who were both dressed inappropriately. 
"Wow, your daughter is hot, I would love to fuck her!" I shouted.
The woman looked horrified and quickly grabbed her child and started shuffling off towards the lift. Maybe now she will think twice about dressing her daughter like a whore. 
"Yo bitch!" I shouted, "I work here! Welcome to the mountain you fucking slut!"

And there ends one of the bleakest books ever written.



Somehow this book is available for anyone to buy on Amazon. You might have got a sense of this already, but I'd not recommend it.


Just in case you were wondering what happened to Allan Saro he finished with a heart warming update on his life.

I eloped in downtown Hilo, Hawaii. To my beautiful wife HDR, without whom I would be lost. I currently reside in a quiet community in Pennsylvania, where I continue to write.

I'm sure, like me, you're all glad it all ended up working out swimmingly for Allan.



After reading the book through and being completely amazed that anyone would write anything this rotten and would want to actually put their name against these stories I reread the preface, looking for some sort of explanation. I didn't make much of the preface when I started reading the book, but after going through the experience some parts of it start making more sense.

My life has changed considerably since I first wrote this book. I got married, bought a house, and moved to the country. At the offset this book has been very off putting to most readers. I understood that when I first began to write it in October 2011. May goal was never to offend anyone.

You didn't want to offend anyone? Seriously? What the hell was the goal? What sort of person did you think wants to read a mix of; advice on taking up skiing/snowboarding, the dreary details about being a lift operator, all underlaid with insights into the life and thoughts of a sexual predator of young girls?

As a fair warning this book is extremely sexually charged. Despite heavy warning from not only my editor but also close friends and family I still believe the content of this book is worth exploring. 

It wasn't.

Then finally, because this single sentence surely makes everything all right, he throws in the big get-out-of-jail card....

It is 100 percent satire and should be taken as such.

One of two things is the truth; either this book is actually a grim insight  into the deranged character of Allan Saro and his activities, and he should probably be on some sort of register, or, he has created the single least satirical satire in all of written history.

I'll leave it to you to decide.


↧
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The Dirty Protest & How many socks do you really need?

February 5, 2015, 7:27 am
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This season I've been doing some colouring-in to help fill the pages of Whitelines magazine, so for the first time this stuff is being looked over by the terrified eyes of some professional editors. It's been a interesting process and at times things have become very heated as it did with my latest spread. Today I'm going to reveal all and show you what really happens behind the Wizard's curtain...



From: Duthie
Sent: Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:01
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

Happy New Year Illicit, hope you had a good one.

How's the piece for the next issue looking?

Cheers,
Duthie
[Whitelines Deputy Editor]

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Illicit Snowboarding
Sent: Sat, 3 January 2015 at 13:19
To: Duthie; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

See what you make of this. No mega LOLs this time, but I thought it was an interesting thing to graphic up.

Illicit

Attachment: Whitelines kit final.psd

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Ed Blomfield
Sent: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 11:24
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Duthie; Tim Whitlock

Hey Illicit,

This is ace - just noticed that the price for the helmet is different in the pic and in your closing text.

Some smart arses might look at the lack of board in the first section and think "how can you ride without a snowboard?" Obviously, you mean they could rent, but could be worth adding rental cost in there somewhere, or (to counter the first issue at the same time) give the sections different names e.g. "The Rent Boy", "The Keano", "The Excess Baggage"

Thoughts Tim?

Ed
[Whitelines Editor] (As if a man called Ed was going to have any other job)

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Tim Whitlock
Sent: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 12:43
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Ed Blomfield; Duthie

I don't care about the words, it's just nice to look at.

Tim
[Whitelines Art Director]

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Illicit Snowboarding
Sent: Tue, 6 January 2015 at 12:48
To: Duthie; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

Good feedback. I felt it has the same problems, but I was too arted out by the time I got to the wording to find a good solution. Liked your naming idea. Does this scan better?

I've fixed the helmet pricing too.

Illicit

Attachment: Whitelines kit a bit more final.psd

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Ed Blomfield
Sent: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 16:22
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Duthie; Tim Whitlock

I'm glad you put "a bit more final" for the filename cos I just clocked something else. :)

As it stands you've suggested the keen shredder buys an extra 2 thermal tops (total 3) and 5 socks (total 6). Maybe we're skanky here at WL but even though we get lots of stuff free none of us take more than 2 sets of thermals and 3 pairs of socks on a strict rotation. Could you reduce these down accordingly?

Ed

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Illicit Snowboarding
Sent: Tue, 6 January 2015 at 16:45
To: Duthie; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

I would have to redo all the maths, which means we really have to be sure for me to go to the trouble of making that change.

I see your 3 socks and I raise you Christmas presents. Surely everyone has at least 6 pairs of socks and extra thermal tops due to Christmas presents?

Aside from that though, why don't you take more socks? They take up next to no space and it sounds like you have plenty of spare pairs lying around. You're strange sock rationing cult at Whitelines sounds a bit weird to me.

I used to share a room with a lad that would rotate a single pair of socks on a permanent basis… We don't talk any more.

Illicit

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Duthie
Sent: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 16:52
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

Ah but if they're Christmas presents, then surely it doesn't matter how much they cost? No-one's gonna buy more than 3 pairs are they?

Duthie

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Illicit Snowboarding
Sent: Tue, 6 January 2015 at 16:57
To: Duthie; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

You still pay for them. It feels like you’re buying a scarf for your mum, but you're really just over-paying for some crappy ski socks. I should probably be putting the prices up if anything.

Illicit

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Duthie
Sent: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 17:01
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

Fair point, although I've still never met anyone with 6 pairs of snowboard socks. There have been many times when I wish I had.

Duthie

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Tim Whitlock
Sent: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 17:23
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Ed Blomfield; Duthie

I wore the same thermals for 14 days straight last year with only a quick shower rinse out along the way. And in the spring too haha.

Tim

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Duthie
Sent: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 17:32
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

That makes me glad we were only staying with you for the first 7...

Duthie

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Ed Blomfield
Sent: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 17:37
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Duthie; Tim Whitlock

Do as we say, not as we do.

Which is why I wouldn't recommend anyone copy my own first season, in which I used one pair for the entire winter *without* washing. In the end I believe they began to clean themselves, like dreadlocks. On the other hand you could hold them out straight and they wouldn't bend. They kind of doubled as divining rods...

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Illicit Snowboarding
Sent: Tue, 6 January 2015 at 17:50
To: Duthie; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

...but instead of the power of finding water they had the power of repelling women?

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Illicit Snowboarding
Sent: Tue, 6 January 2015 at 18:05
To: Duthie; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

OK guys. I'm giving in and taking on board your dirty protests so I've made the change.

Illicit

Attachment: Whitelines kit final for dirty rotten scoundrels.psd

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Sam McMahon
Sent: Tue, 6 January 2015 at 18:14
To: Illicit Snowboarding; Duthie; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

I was only just brought up to speed on this chat so instead of in gentle stage my mind was blown in one go. SIX PAIRS OF SNOWBOARD SOCKS! WTF?! I did a whole season with just the one pair, admittedly my house mates didn't enjoy it too much but I found a quick rinse whilst I was showering every other day was enough to keep them from crawling away.

Still using the same pair actually, four years later, though I now own two other pairs. Which I paid for. And that's more than sufficient for actually living out here.

Yours, astonished,

Sam
[Whitelines Online Editor]

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Illicit Snowboarding
Sent: Tue, 6 January 2015 at 18:16
To: Sam McMahon; Duthie; Ed Blomfield; Tim Whitlock

I'm still not talking to you Sam.






And that my friends, is how snowboard magazine editing works. At first the one thing I found odd about the Whitelines editorial set-up was that they all work remotely; Ed out west, Duthie in Scotland, Tim in London and Sam in the Alps. After this email exchange I now understand why they can't stand to be around each other. Stick these four guys in an office and it would be a gas chamber.

Which leaves us with the big question…How many socks do you rock?


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The Curious World of Snowboard Cosplay

March 5, 2015, 6:36 am
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Skiers dressed in damp, crotch-splitting animal onesies has been one of this seasons most notable clothing trends, but it's possible to put a lot more effort in. These days there's a group people who take dressing-up and not growing-up to another level entirely and now some of them have brought cosplaying to snowboarding. I'm an expert on pretending to be someone else, so let me guide you through the various characters and costumes...


A transformer with a hugely overcompensating codpiece...must be Cocktimus Prime



Left to right: Cocktimus Prime, his shy brother Megathong, Winston Churchill, a woman sniffing a leak and Sex Toy Man



Tardis Girl. Having sex with her must be like throwing a sausage down Regent Street.



A Ninja in drag



It's Smashing Pumkins frontman Billy Corgan



Ruroc's new prototype helmet



Madonna about to do a 'Brit awards'



A lady dressed as a generic Japanese cartoon porn character



A plethora of ruined snowboards



Katknees Everdeen



Niche porn



A lesbian



Shitara from Thundercats


A brace of Jawas



Moob Boy


& finally...

Took me a while to notice this wasn't a cosplay, it's some lad taking a picture of his snowboard and life-sized sex doll...


And this is his sinister array of masturbation pillows.


And that my friends is all you need to know about that.



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Snowboarding Korea Style – Adventures in Fashion

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Search

The First Edition of Blunt Magazine - What was all the fuss about?

March 19, 2015, 7:37 am
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In the early 90's Ken Block (him of the spinny cars) and Damon Way, decided to use the shotgun approach to entrepreneurism and start-up every company. Within a few years they'd created Eightball clothing, Type A Snowboards, Droors clothing (which later became DC Shoes) and Blunt Magazine. Blunt ran from 1993 until 1998, when it was closed by the then owners Larry Flynn Publications (him of the porn), because it was a little too edgy for them. We've managed to get hold of the first edition to take a look at why this mag is so fondly remembered in the misty water-coloured memories of a generation of snowboarders...


To start things off, and to save me having to write 'n' shit, here's a short retrospective to give things some context.




And without further ado, here's the first mag. Click on the images to embiggen them. 


Later editions featured pictures of snowboarding on the front so punters had some idea of what they were buying.




Nice version of the Division 23 logo



Joyride come straight in with a ad featuring a pissing tramp.


The whole mag was essentially the 90's equivalent of a teaser trailer


Pool tips didn't go on to be a regular feature.







A porn star advertising Eighball clothing

There's a lot of words in this article. I didn't read them




Magazine interviews used to be a lot simpler...
Q: Do you like handrails?
A: Yeah, I like handrails, they are fun.






And there it was.

Like everything, Blunt developed over time with more ideas getting crammed into each edition, and snowboard photography replacing the "video capture" style that dominated the first edition. Here's a man called Onion looking through a later edition...




Mr Onion is pretty sad that there's no snowboard magazine like this today and that he can no longer send letters to them demanding upskirt shots of their employee's. But I don't think he needs to pine much though, because what once was only available in Blunt Magazine is now available in overwhelming doses. What was a memorable occasional novelty to snowboarders of the 90s is now the daily reality of the world wide web and this type of content exploded at roughly the time that Blunt closed it's doors. The only real difference is that it's now rare to see misogyny and porn mixed in with the snowboarding content, but them all that's always just a short bookmark away if it floats your boat.



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When Thrasher Magazine Did Snowboarding

Absolutely Radical - The World’s First Snowboard Magazine (A Literary Review)

The first edition of Whitelines - a glimpse into the snowboarding world of 1995

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A Guide to The 19 Greatest Snowboarder Autogrammkarten

March 26, 2015, 7:35 am
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As well as a shared enthusiasm for leather shorts and coach tours, the people of Germany, Austria and Switzerland also love amassing collections of autographed celebrity photo cards. That's been a great opportunity for the region's little-known slalom snowboarders to raise their profiles by banging out a daft photo pose and scrawl all over them. This week we take a look at the best examples of this regionally specific bit of snowboard culture...



19. Simona Meiler turns awkward posing up to level 5000

Knee sponsorship is the future of professional snowboarding




18. Anke Karstens throws a moody Hasselhoff





17. Here's the Hasselhoff again with a hint of Something About Mary thrown in for good measure by Amelie Kober




16. Amelie Kober again, but different 





15. Boardercrossdresser





14 Isabella Laböck also sporting the milk maid get-up that gets those autogrammkarte collector's juices flowing




13. Isabella Laböck again, but very different




12. Julia Dujmovits celebrates her Sochi medal by going for the full psychotic pose





11. Steffi Von Siebenthal fucking loves LSD




10. Susanne Moll has a ski lift chair in her spartan living room and employs a traditionally dressed servant to feed her



9. Sigi Grebner is looking for a goggle sponsor





8. Toni Unterkoffer is looking for a snowboard sponsor





7. Isabel Derungs has a swearing finger that's doubles as a pen





6. Thomas Lambert has this face





5. Just seconds after this picture was taken, Emilie Aubry horrifically crashed into herself

knee sponsorship again, is this a thing, have I missed something?



4. Philipp Schoch loves his snowboard, a bit too much





3. Talking about loving too much...Markus Schairer paints his walls with spunk




2. Olivia Nobs...apparently





1. Talking about cocks, here's Jose Fernandes and his epically unfortunate signature



If this has inspired you to get collecting then all the action is here on the eBay 


Bonus Section - We found two other awesome autogrammkarte on our travels...

Everything about this is 1000% cool


Heini Baumgartner camel toes the shit out of autogrammkarten



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4 Things Isabella Laböcks' appearance in Playboy tells us about the current state of snowboarding


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Top 141 Snowboarding Celebrities Megapost

June 18, 2015, 6:26 am
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We've been collecting snowboarding celebrity sightings for over seven years and occasionally producing the odd top 10 article, but today we've gone all in and thrown all 141 confirmed snowboarding celebrity sightings into one mega infographic. Welcome to what must be the most overly-researched entirely-vapid snowboarding post of all time....

Here's the graphic. Just click on the pic to embiggen it and make it readable...



  • Celebrity ranking was calculated by how many times the celebrity's Wikipedia page was viewed in June 2015.
  • Snowboarding ability is an estimate based on available media. If you are a snowboarding celebrity and feel that your snowboard skills have been ill-judged, please feel free to complain in the comments.



Here are some interesting things we discovered...

Biggest celebrity, celebrity snowboarder - Justin Beiber

Lets start with the bad news: the world's most famous snowboarder (and coincidentally the worlds biggest douche) is the Beiber.


He's a very average snowboarder (here's a clip of him attempting some sorry looking ollies) and his most significant snowboarding contribution was that time he pissed his initials in the snow in Aspen...





Least celebrity, celebrity snowboarder - Kevin Bentley

At the other end of the scale and racking up a paltry 166 views on his Wikipedia page, is Kevin Bentley. He's a former NFL linebacker who had a ten year career playing for Cleveland, Seattle, and Houston.



He's a very good snowboarder. Towards the end of his career he qualified as a snowboarding instructor and he's been plying his trade in Vail for the past 6 years.



Which leads us onto...

Most surprising source of good at snowboarding celebrity snowboarders - American Footballers

These guys seem to have a lot of spare time to try out other dangerous sports. The latest news is that Troy Polamalu, who just retired after 12 years playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers and starring in Head & Shoulders commercials, fancies his chances of being a professional snowboarder.

He'll be most remembered for his impressive Diana Ross impersonation.

I'm excited that we're drafting this new volume of hair into snowboarding. It's something we've been sorely missing since Shaun White was shorn.




Best at snowboarding, celebrity snowboarder - Lisa Miskovsky

Lisa Miskovsky is a Swedish singer who used to be in the Swedish snowboard team, so we're going to assume she's fairly good.

The cover of her most recent album is an impressively stereotypical Swedish photo. Umeå must be the name of the sofa range.




Celebrity snowboarding musical interlude - Jamiroquai and Light Years 


The most impressive part of the video is how they perfectly predicted the tsunami of low quality Go Pro edits that now flood the interweb.



Most awkward looking celebrity snowboarder photo - Snooki 





Best fake celebrity snowboarder videos - Steve Nash & Ricky Tomlinson

Basketballer Steve Nash showcases some dubious snowboard skills and his team mates showcase and impressive array of dubious acting skills...


And giving that video a run for it's awkward money, here's British actor Ricky Tomlinson in an ad for some muggy frozen food purveyor.





Sweariest celebrity snowboarder - John Kerry

That time when current US Secretary of State and then Presidential contender John Kerry called a Secret Service agent a "son of a bitch".

Coincidentally is was also the exact time that snowboarding officially became uncool



Record fine for celebrity snowboarding - Vladimir Radmanovic

When he played for the LA Lakers in 2007, basketballer Vladimir Radmanovic was fined $500,000 for separating his shoulder when he tried snowboarding. That's a record NBA fine.

I'm pretty sure it's general snowboarding record too, beating every other fine for snowboarding by around about half a million dollars.



Here's the full list of celebrity snowboarders. Fuck knows why we collected this list, or why anyone would want to read the whole thing, but if any one does, feel free to fill your boots...





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4 Things Isabella Laböcks' appearance in Playboy tells us about the current state of snowboarding

May 14, 2014, 7:27 am
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Over a year ago we put together an article looking at what was then a small trickle of professional snowboarders who had taken their kit off for publicity. At that time there were 7 ladies and 5 guys who had given it a try. One of the strange things we noticed around this year's Olympics was that in the space of a few months the total number of female athletes choosing to go down this route has more than doubled with another 8 taking the plunge. What does that mean for snowboarding?...

Trend 1. The number of women are taking their clothes off for publicity has increased rapidly

The trickle hasn't exactly turned into a flood yet, but at this rate, by the time we get to the next Olympics will there be any female snowboarders who will actually be wearing clothes?


Ina Meschik
Parallel Giant Slalom - 4th
We included a bunch of photos from her bonkers photo shoot in Top TENuous 12, which included this just slightly suggestive shot.




Alena Zavarzina
Parallel Giant Slalom - Bronze
Alena was caught suffering from an awkward wardrobe malfunction while frolicking with fellow professional snowboarder Alena Alekhine, in a shoot for a Russian magazine we spotted in Top TENous 11.




Julia Dujmovits
Parallel Slalom - Gold
Julia was another snowboarder we spotted in Top TENous 11 and she loves getting involved in any photo shoot. Since then, she won gold in the parallel slalom and we found a few more pictures.






Although to be fair, Julia Dujmovits, doesn't dress like this to be raunchy, she is genuinely dressing disabled...




Valeruya Tsoy
Parallel Slalom - 32nd Place
Valeruya proved to be the Anna Kournikova of snowboarding and she made an appearance in Top TENuous 10.




Deborah Antonioz
Snowboard Cross - Quarter Finals
Deborah, didn't get all that far this time out but she won silver in the same event in Vancouver and she featured in the latest addition of Top TENuous.



Trend 2. Men don't get anywhere near the same value from baring all.

That's now 15 women to 5 men choosing this publicity route in a sport where the majority of participants are male. That's a very significant difference, particularly given that none of this recent crop were men. It indicates that the publicity benefits for this type of photo soot are heavily weighted towards women, as are the pitfalls.


Elena Hight
Halfpipe - Although she make the US team for Sochi.
But she did take over the role of ESPN body edition's snowboarding representation from the previous occupants Louie Vito (the last man to try this) and Gretchen Bleiler, who featured in our original article.




And she got her baps out in one of the most awkward photo shoot set-ups in all of snowboarding history...



Trend 3. It is escalating not just in terms of the number of people, but in the amount of clothes taken off

After our original article one of the riders we featured, Alexis White, left this comment:

"There was always pressure to pump your female career thru your sexuality if you had some sex appeal, I did, I did it, it's strange and I'm glad I am not in this arena with that kind of pressure any more! Thank God I never did Playboy or anything! I regret nothing and I am glad I am past it."


And now that line has now been crossed...

Isabella Laböck
Parallel Giant Slalom - 1/8 Finals


"Ski-Cross-Ass", the least complimentary way they could possibly find to introduce an Olympic skier


And of course got also her baps out...



Oh right...




You know your not famous enough to do this when you have to write your name on all the photos





In front of massive tea cup


In the massive tea cup

Pretending to be a sexy tea bag

& making the water suspiciously bubbly


4. The less popular the snowboarding event, the less clothes the snowboarders wear

You might have noticed the majority of the riders featured here were slalom competitors (6 out of 8). Slalom has been experiencing declining fortunes for years now, and once again it was the snowboarding event that got the least coverage and viewers at the Olympics:

The more the fortunes of slalom decline, the more the competitors will disrobe in the hunt for more coverage to try and increase their sponsorship money. Just by looking at the stickers on Isabella Laböck's snowboard you can see the difficulty these athletes already have attracting sponsorship. The more the fortunes of alpine snowboarding fall the more likely we are to see this kind of thing in the future.

Extra points to the industrial conveyor manufacturer Budde for their inadvertent cock and balls logo. 




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The original article: The Hypersexualisation of Snowboarding


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Alibaba and the 40,000 Crappy Snowboards

May 29, 2014, 7:36 am
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The Chinese eCommerce group Alibaba is about to go public in what is expected to be the largest tech IPO of all time. 80% of everything sold online in China goes through this company and they flog more merchandise than Amazon and eBay combined. It's not a company most people outside China are familiar with, so we figured we'd take a look and see what all the excitement is about...


The Alibaba.com site puts manufactures in touch with importers and when we ran a search for 'snowboard' things didn't get off to a good start. This was the 5th result:

Neither a snowboard nor a set of plastic children.



Next in line was this:

A two-for-one deal? Bonus!


On the first page of 20 results, along with these two, there was an inflatable sledge, 5 plastic snowboards, a set of dual snowboards, an LED snowboard and a snowboard that thought it was a binding. That's not a good hit rate. But it's not just reams of shonky made-in-China tat that you can buy on Alibaba.com, you can buy crap from all around the world.

Austria's only product was this set of ground-breaking snowboard bindings

"We created a new binding concept to uplift the entire snowboarding world: the Strap-in"



In an uncanny representation of the generation-long shift in manufacturing to China from the USA, this was the US contribution.


On the plus side we were really pleased to see that South Korea is still absolutely rocking the fuck out, with their incredible snowboard fashions and awesome model poses. Here are a few of our favourite ones:

South Korea - putting the swag in swagger.



A good chunk of the world's snowboards are now manufactured in China, but I think there's some way to go before the companies out there start pushing their own brands into other markets. Here's a glimpse into the current state of snowboard marketing in China from local manufacturer Haisky:

From this day forth I'm always going to refer to my bindings as 'feet tramples'


Snowboard graphics have got some way to go too...



Amongst all their horrible own designs was this one by French company Windlip snowboards...

Chinese version / French version


It's not clear on how legitimate that is (I think they may have some part in the production of some of the Windlip snoabords), but it lead us to a few even more dubious snowboards you can buy. From a series of questioningly separate dealers in Slovakia, Ukraine and Moldova, you can buy batches of the Briana Banks Sims Fader board from 2004.



Seems highly unlikely they have batches of unsold Sims boards from 10 years ago, so your're pretty much guaranteed to either, never see your money again, or get a very shitty reproduction. Either way it's still probably a better way of spending your money, than forking out the $4,000 someone is currently trying to flog an original one on eBay for.


My favourite knock-offs by far are these Arbor boards currently being sold on Alibaba's version of eBay in China, Taobao.com. They've not even tried to make these things even remotely look like an Arbor design and they've got the balls to ask for a hefty $480 per board.

New for the 2014/15 season, decorated with all sorts of Halloween clip art, comes the Arbor Prospect.

And even better is the 2014/15 Arbor Sequence with it's karaoking werewolves. 


Alibaba is a company that could ultimately be valued at more than $16 billion, and as far as we can see it's full of tat, dual snowboards, and shonky knock-offs. All things considered, when the opportunity arises, I'll probably not be adding these guys to my diverse stock portfolio.



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