Burton Skiing Shop

Jake Burton isn't the patron saint of snowboarding, he's just a guy who started making snowboards and never stopped.

Burton Snowboards is not necessarily a result of Jake's success, but more likely a long succession of mistakes. Born in New York City on April 29, 1954, Jake spent his childhood in Cedarhurst, New York.

Jake was named after a great uncle John Burton ('a real character'), who lived in his hometown. Living not far from the Atlantic Beach, some journalists have inferred that Jake grew up surfing, and that it was this interest that inspired him to develop a winter substitute. Well, yes and no. "I always wanted a surf board for Christmas," he says, "but I never got one. Maybe that's been part of my drive for board sports. Maybe if I had gotten that surf board..." For sports, Jake settled for kneeboarding (and became quite accomplished), baseball, basketball and football. "I would routinely get my ass kicked."

More than anything, skiing was the sporting basis for Jake's venture into snowboarding. His first skiing experience was at tiny Birch Hill ski area in New York at the age of seven. "I was into it." It has helped that Jake has gone more than a mile in ski boots; the sharing of acreage, technology and enthusiasts has gone a long way to maintain the compatibility between skiing and snowboarding.

Jake doesn't claim to have invented the snowboard. Earlier models as well as many other would-be inventors preclude him from doing so. At a local garage sale, Jake found a board dating back to the 1920s. The recent discovery of a 1939 video showing a man by the name of Vern Wicklund sliding sideways on a snowboard type of sled down a Chicago hill also deepens the history of snowboarding. Wicklund even had patents for the boards, which had foot straps, nose cords, and a turned up nose, not unlike the early Burton snowboards.

One recognized precursor of the snowboard is the Snurfer: a device that resembles a short, fat ski without the P-tex, steel edges and bindings. A rope tied to the tip is held in the rider's hand as a rein.The rider stands on it like a skateboard. Jake's first attempt at snurfing was at Brooks, his first attempt at boarding school, when he was 14. "Pretty suicidal." (The Snurfer, not the school.) Jake managed to break his finger by snurfing, rope hand extended right into a tree. He also managed to break a lot of rules at Brooks. "I was an underachiever. I had the reputation of beating the system." The coup de grace came in 9th grade when, after pleading with an upperclassman for weeks, Jake was given the "keys." Keys to what? "To every lock in the place. The food. The headmaster's gun cabinet. Full access." Unfortunately, Jake didn't hide them very well. The janitors found them in his bag the same night he took possession. "I was asked not to come back."

Things would change dramatically at the next school: Marvelwood-Cornwall, New York, right at the bottom of the ski area. "Skiing was big." Jake excelled in the 10th grade, skipped the 11th and graduated, skiing throughout. He continued to experiment with the Snurfer. "I didn't really have an idea. I was modifying it, but in the context of the time it was marketed as a toy."

The death of his mother at the time, and previously the death of his brother George in Vietnam (Jake's son is named after him) certainly had profound effects on Jake's life that go far deeper than words on a page. Jake inherited a small amount of money from his mother that would play a role in the beginnings at Burton Snowboards. But that would have to wait until after college.

Jake enrolled at the University of Colorado with aspirations of making their NCAA Champion Ski Team. Just as classes were starting, Jake managed to break his collarbone three times in two weeks, without putting on a ski. The first time was in an auto accident, when a Suburban in which he was a passenger collided with a VW Bug going 80mph. Number two was on campus. "I was walking with a map, not watching where I was going, and I ran into a guy doing the same thing." The final blow came while trying to skateboard on a linoleum basement floor. Colorado lasted one year, and Jake never made the ski team.

Jake took a year off from school to groom and exercise thoroughbred horses, working in Virginia and at New York's Aqueduct Race Track - a foreshadowing of the kind of man that goes off to pursue an interest as far as it will take him. In this case, dissolution with the thoroughbred racing scene took him right back to school, this time at New York University studying economics. "Not business," Jake is quick to point out, as if someone might think that he actually had formal business training.

Jake's informal business training came from two sources. First, there was a landscaping business that he and a friend started in high school. It was a success, but a success that would give him a false sense of security. "Our only investment was an old station wagon, a couple of rakes and some trash bags." Second, he spent a year working as an assistant in a Park Avenue firm that sold smaller companies ("like Burton") to larger ones. With his boss embroiled in a major lawsuit, a lot of responsibility was delegated to Jake. "I was in over my head. I made a lot of mistakes. I just wasn't happy."
After college Jake was feeling like a true entrepreneur, like a man who had experience running his own business and who knew the ropes of the business world. He was thumbing a chunk of inheritance money and feeling disdain for working in the city. Jake was primed to make one of the biggest mistakes of his life. "I had this burning desire to make snowboards."

In 1977, Jake went to Vermont and began Burton Boards in Londonderry. "I hired two relatives and a friend - big mistake." There were other mistakes, too, for within two years he was $100,000 in debt. "I had to go down to New York in the summer and make money the hard way." Bartending at night and teaching tennis by day kept him afloat. Seeing his doubting friends in the city kept him driven.

Without the cash to support a payroll, Jake was on his own. No longer was he the entrepreneur. "I was the grunt. If the board says Jake Burton Carpenter on it, I jigsawed it. I urethaned it. The quality was good." Was it fun? "Step up to the pin router with a little piece of wood, it's not fun. I was a total loser in shop class. But I always enjoyed making boards." Jake's experiments with materials and designs were never-ending. "I was going to the hardware store to get ideas." Driving to Las Vegas for the annual trade shows and taking the boards on the road, things began to turn around. A lot of backhill R&D kept things evolving, like a Snurfer-sponsored open division contest in Michigan, which in 1979 Jake entered and won.

When Jake's wife-to-be, Donna (who unintentionally became an important part of the business), came to live with him in Vermont, the garage business was beginning to fill the house. "The barn was production, upstairs a warehouse, the dining room was an office, the living room was the factory showroom." When people called the toll-free number, it rang in the bedroom. "I would get calls from kids on the West Coast at 2 a.m., waking me up. I'd be there, taking down their name and address..."

One of the keys to the success of Burton was Jake's push to make snowboarding a sport, even though initially ski area access was not on Jake's agenda. "I kept saying, 'this sport has got to happen". It worked almost too well. "Sport first," he says, pointing to his introduction in an early catalog which promotes the sport of snowboarding without mentioning Burton the company. "Purely sport, not Burton. We worked with ski areas. We set up competitions. But left ourselves open." Although he had created a market, overnight a competitive industry was born as well. Jake realized the focus that had to be on Burton products and dug in.

On a ski trip to Europe with Donna's family, Jake slipped away at night to visit ski manufacturers and learn everything he could about the latest technology. "I showed up at this one factory at 11pm. They had to bring the owner's daughter in from another town to translate." As a result of his European experience, steel edges and P-tex bases became the standard, and also, Jake became aware of the potential of the European market. He and Donna went to Middlebury College to learn German. The accelerated program required a pledge: to speak only German for the duration of the six-week class. "What was I going to do? I had a company to run. I had my fingers crossed." Ultimately, Jake and Donna set up Burton USA's Austrian counterpart, Burton Sportartikel in Innsbruck, which is now the nerve center of the European market.

In 1995, the Japanese snowboard market was expanding dramatically. To keep up with demand, Jake continued to expand the business by opening an office in Japan. With this new direct link to the Asian market, Burton Snowboards was now truly a global company. In 1998, snowboarding would make its Olympic debut bringing the sport into the world's spotlight. And at the 2002 Olympics, three Burton pro riders won medals at the Salt Lake City Winter Games - including Ross Powers and Kelly Clark who won the gold and Chris Klug who won the bronze. From the small in-house factory in southern Vermont to a Global company with distribution points throughout the world, Jake has truly brought snowboarding to a world class level.

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