'Snurfer' climbs to top of snow biz
By Jean H. Lee
Associated Press
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Inspired by a child's toy, Jake Burton Carpenter — then in his 20s — rigged up a pin router in a friend's barn and carved planks of wood into what looked like a small surfboard. He strung a rope through the front of it and called it a snow surfer.
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Twice, the planks snagged in the router, catapulting them through the barn wall "like something out of 'Austin Powers'," Carpenter, now 47, says with a chuckle. "That could easily have been the end of me."
Mike Rosner is one of 160 employees at the Burton Snowboards factory in South Burlington, Vt.
He survived, and his modification of the '60s-era toy called the Snurfer became commonly known as a snowboard.
Twenty-five years later, snowboarding is among the country's hottest sports and a full-fledged Olympic event. Carpenter has a factory with 160 employees.
"I didn't have this vision that it'd be as big as it is," Carpenter admits. "But I always felt there was a sport there."
Burton Snowboards, founded in 1977, stakes claim to being the world's first snowboarding company. It remains the largest.
Burton sells boards in more than 35 countries, has offices in Japan and Austria, and claims an estimated 25 to 30 percent of the expanding snowboarding market.
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Still privately held, his company produces at least 130 different types of snowboards a year and has expanded into clothing, bags, helmets and other gear.
Company founder Jake Burton Carpenter holds an early-model snowboard, with the latest line at left.
He set up shop his first shop in Londonderry, Vt., hired a friend and two relatives, and started making 1,000 boards that he priced at $88 apiece.
"I went into it thinking: 'I'm going to do this and it's going to be an easy entrepreneurial way to get rich quick,"' he said.
He was wrong. Only 300 of the boards sold. He was forced to lay off his staff — the recollection still makes him cringe — and go it alone, working late into the night after tending bar.
He tried a different approach: creating a sport. For $5, he took people on what he billed as "snow-surfing safaris."
"The business started to click," he recalled. In that second year, he sold 700 boards.
Carpenter said none of this would have happened had he gotten his original wish: "I always wanted to surf."
He never got that surfboard.
