BURLINGTON — With product and distribution issuing from 81 factories, many on the other side of the planet, it sometimes seems as though Burton Snowboards has glided away from its Vermont roots despite its base in the state’s largest city.
The company makes snowboards, boots, bindings, helmets, and clothing that it sells in 14 of its own stores, five outlets, and through another 1,000 retailers worldwide. It also does a brisk online business, with fulfillment out of its Ohio warehouse.
Most of its snowboards are made at the Keil factory with 80 workers in Austria; other items are made at an array of facilities all over the world.
But it all starts at the 10,000-square-foot R&D and prototyping facilities on Burton’s Burlington campus. There, 13 people create designs for clothing, boots, helmets and goggles that will hit store shelves as much as 24 months later.
The prototype facility is where snowboards for Burton’s professional athletes are made. Workers take one-off snowboards through a long assembly process, and do small-batch production of items that will be tested before being mass-produced.
That’s where the company came up with its revolutionary step-on binding, which enables riders to click onto their boards without bending over. They’re always working on new items, like the helmet shell made from caster bean oil-based nylon that engineers are perfecting in the 3D printing lab, which started up in 2003. Almost every piece of equipment, such as bindings, helmets and boots, passed through the 3D lab at one point in its design, Cunningham said.
“3D printing has changed a lot and made new things possible,” said Chris Doyle, the prototype engineer who runs the company’s 3D printing lab. “You can tweak things a million times, and try things tenfold before you have proof of concept.”
On-snow testers
At Burton’s Burlington factory, a lot of destruction takes place, too. In R&D, workers and machines take hammers and chisels to newly made snowboards. Helmets are drop-tested onto hard objects to test their resilience; products do time in a large minus-20-degree freezer with a homemade snow gun to test how well bindings work when jammed with snow.
“This lab is a torture chamber for products,” said Chris Cunningham, the company’s senior vice president of global products.
The clothing also undergoes trials. Five hundred on-snow testers from all over the world try the products out for Burton with clear instructions to put the hats, goggles, and other equipment through rigorous but typical wear. Many of the testers already work in the industry as guides or instructors, said Cunningham, and they test the items in conditions that don’t exist in the lab, logging the experience as they go.
Vermont roots
Burton’s origin story is one of the best-known in Vermont. The company got its start in Londonderry when Jake Burton Carpenter started adapting a surfboard-shaped board for snow in 1977 in his garage. He moved the company to Burlington in 1992, and worked to advance the sport and push ski resorts to allow snowboarding on their trails.
Burton died of complications from cancer at the age of 65 on Nov. 20. At the time, he held the role of chairman at Burton, and the company of 1,100 employees is still adjusting to the loss.
“He was still deeply involved in the company; he still wore and product-tested every single item,” including hats and gloves, said Elysa Walk, Burton’s senior vice president of the Americas and Europe, on Dec. 4. “He put them through their paces right until the end, hundreds and hundreds of items.”
Jake Burton’s perfectionism shows in every aspect of the Vermont production facility, where just 1% to 2% of the company’s snowboards are made. Mass production takes place elsewhere; at the Burlington facility, boards, boots, goggles, clothes, helmets and bindings are designed and tested by a half-dozen artists and craftsmen.
One version of everything that the company makes, be it clothing, gear or boards, is saved in a 10,00-square-foot archive on site, and the company employs an archivist who can find these catalogued items as needed.
“It was a Jake thing,” said Cunningham. “He saved everything.”
The boards
Most of the snowboards are built from wood and laminated fiberglass, using technology that is exclusive to the Burlington facility. Some of the highest-end boards have a wood core created from as many as 500 pieces of wood from several different species glued together and then sliced thinly.
There’s no better material for snowboard cores than wood right now, said Cunningham. Species such as beech, aspen, and balsa are chosen for lightness and strength.
“Wood has all the right natural properties,” Cunningham said. The core is taken through an array of steps where the layers are pressed together with an epoxy resin and molded into shape under high pressure. The process of creating a new snowboard can take days. But it doesn’t have to; Cunningham said the R&D lab can take a board from design to slope in less than 24 hours if needed. And sometimes it is needed – for example, if there’s a chance that the best snow is at Stowe on that day.
“Jake has always ingrained a sense of urgency in us,” said Cunningham. “Burton has always moved fast: people are surprised at how fast we move.”
While it’s less expensive to mass-produce the equipment and clothing overseas, Cunningham said it makes financial sense to do the R&D in Burlington.
“We’d have to there to get our hands dirty and work with product,” he said. “This is definitely the most cost-effective way to innovate.”
Some of the Burlington-made boards never make it past the prototype stage; some are tested out by professional athletes who give feedback to Burton.
“What you see the professionally athletes ride is typically available in stores, but sometimes they might be riding a construction or shape that is slightly different because they may be testing the next best thing,” said Cunningham.
Back at the office
Four hundred people work at the company’s headquarters in Burlington. The offices occupy a set of industrial buildings that now sport many ski-lodge-like features, including a huge and briskly burning fireplace in the lobby where employees worked at the hearth on a recent wintry day. Dogs stroll everywhere, usually close beside a person; Walk said there are 140 canines in the building on any given day. The company has a registration process to keep track of them all.
Burton recently became a B Corp, and has spent seven years working on its community and environmental impact, according to Ali Kenney, Burton’s senior vice president of global strategy and insights. B Corps pledge to follow environmental and social sustainability practices that make community benefit a priority, not just profit.
To this end, Burton uses a third-party auditing program for textile production, Bluesign, to make sure the factories are following accepted environmental practices. The company is committed to fair labor practices and safe working conditions throughout its supply chain.
Life in the Burlington office includes amenities like on-tap kombucha, organic garden plots, flexible work schedules, season passes to ski areas, and free lunchtime seminars on things like beer brewing.
Kenney said Burton has three full-time staff members dedicated to its sustainability mission. The company publishes extensive information about its factories on its website.
In Vermont, Burton is active in efforts to increase working and living conditions and erasing the pay gap women face in the workplace, said Meg Smith, director of the Vermont Women’s Fund. She noted Burton’s women’s leadership institute as an example. Carpenter, the CEO, paid the expenses for every employee who wanted to travel to Washington, D.C. for the Women’s March in 2017.
“Burton has been a leader in this since before anybody was even talking about real wage equity,” Smith said.
Jake and Donna Carpenter have sought to make snowboarding more accessible through programs like the CHILL Foundation, founded in 1995, which works with social service agencies, mental health agencies, foster care programs, juvenile justice programs and schools to help connect young people with board sports — including surfing and skateboarding — at no cost.
The two have long sought to democratize snowboarding and make it more available, said Walk.
“We are so fortunate we are privately owned by Jake and Donna,” said Walk. “They are not out to get rich; they have never been about that.”
The sustainability push extends to the prototype lab. One of the goals of the Burlington facility is to find a way to recycle snowboards when their useful days are over, said Cunningham.
Right now, he says, the snowboard would start to come apart if heated in a vinegar-like acetic acid that can dissolve the hardener of the resin system so the snowboard’s materials can be pulled apart, said Cunningham. The company’s goal is to produce snowboards one day that are entirely recyclable.
“We aren’t there yet, but working toward this ‘end of life’ solution,” he said.