Burton Snowboards history

After his disappointing first attempt at selling his boards, Carpenter went to Europe and spent the summer of 1978 testing his boards on the glaciers in Austria.

The first year, 1979, he sold only 300 boards, the equivalent of six days’ production.

Year by year, the financial loses mounted, leaving Carpenter $130,000 in debt by 1981.

Far from it; the first resort to allow snowboarders on lifts, Vermont’s Stratton Mountain, wouldn’t do so until 1983.

The other half came from people like myself who crossed over from skiing.” In the winter of 1984-85, when it was rare to see a snowboarder on the slopes, skiers accounted for a total of 51 million visits to United States ski areas.

In 1985 Burton had established a European Division in Innsbruck, Austria and within the next year distribution had begun in New Zealand.

Time magazine infamously ran an article in 1988 naming snowboarding as the year’s “Worst New Sport.” That, says Donna Carpenter, was actually the working title for the documentary.

Returning to the United States in 1989, Donna became Burton’s chief financial officer.

Burton Snowboards moved from Manchester to Burlington, Vermont in 1992 due to the fact that Burlington is Vermont’s largest city.

More than 300 companies in the United States were competing for snowboard business in 1995, but all of the contenders took a backseat to Burton Snowboards.

ESPN launched the Winter X Games in 1997, televising competitive snowboarding for one of the first times on a major sports network.

A milestone was the introduction of boarding events in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

By the winter of 2001-02, when skier-visits totaled 54.2 million, snowboarders accounted 16 million of the visits.

Kelly, who died in an avalanche in British Columbia in 2003, was instrumental in developing what would become Carpenter’s driving mindset of putting the rider first and designing boards around his team.

Beginning in 2004, Burton started to acquire a few smaller snowboarding companies as well as skateboarding, surfing and even apparel companies that made T-shirts, shorts and bathing suits.

Riding high: Jake Burton Carpenter on Stowe Mountain in January 2007, a year before the financial crisis wreaked havoc on his business.

When Burton failed to do so in 2009, J.P. Morgan charged the company $4 million.

Cause of death was complications from testicular cancer, for which he was first treated in 2011.

His wife, Donna, who had built Burton alongside him for 37 years, took the CEO reins in 2016.

Photo: Jake Carpenter with Shaun White, 2017