Everything you ever wanted to know about snowboard manufacturing!
Posted by: nico in BrOADER[tech], BrOADER[view]
Snowboard manufacturing is not something you can read a lot about in the snowboard mags or even on the Internet. Strong brands spend a lot of money in marketing, communication, sponsorship, events, and team riders to make sure that when you go out to buy that new board you will choose the right brand with the right image, but sometimes they tend to omit the fact that a nice “Made In the Alps” can also be a strong purchasing argument.
We wanted to know more about snowboard production so we asked John Colvin from the Elan Snowboard Factory, one of the major snowboard production facilities in the world.
In the interview below, John gives us an overview of snowboard production facilities worldwide, and tells us which snowboard brands run their own facilities, and which rely on OEMs. We then discuss the work processes at the Elan Snowboard Factory to better understand how each brand is treated for the production of its boards. John also shared a cool video that details every step of a snowboard’s production at the Elan Factory. Finally we tried to make him tell us what will be the main innovations on our snowboards in the winters to come but hey, he would have to kill us after telling us, so we’d rather wait and see!
It’s a pretty long interview, but you’ll definitively learn a lot about what is happening in the backstage of snowboarding and honestly it’s really interesting to have a better feel of from which production line your board is coming out…think about it the next time you buy a board and maybe you’ll add “eco-friendly factory”, “quality” and “innovation” alongside brand, design and camber profile in your list of criterias.
