The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 21.2
CULTURE AND COMMUNITY: In the Vroom Vroom Toon Room
Words: Ben Shanks Kindlon 2023-10-24 09:48:29
Michael Toohey at work at his mobile tuning service known as the Vroom Vroom Toon Room in Seattle, WA.
Photo: Joshua Poehlein
If you care about the quality of your ride, a proper tune is of the utmost importance. Just ask Michael Toohey, owner and operator of the Vroom Vroom Toon Room, a shop-on-wheels servicing snowboarders in Seattle and beyond. “Tuning is different than waxing,” Toohey says. “It’s using the right wax for the right temperature. It’s knowing how to break up the static-electric resistance between your plastic base and the snow you’re riding on…there’s so much to it.” He clearly could speak on this topic for hours given the chance. “It makes your experience so much better,” he says. “I’m not going to the mountain without a freshly tuned deck.”
Toohey doesn’t want snowboarders in his community to head to the mountain untuned either. That’s one of many reasons he started a mobile tuning service. In need of a late-night fix up before tomorrow’s first chair? Give Toohey a ring and soon you’ll see his van rambling down your road—a boxy, black 2000 Chevrolet Astro—the Vroom Vroom Toon Room.
Toohey, who’s been riding for 26 of his 40 years, has held various jobs in the snowboard industry since his late teens. Growing up in Vermont, he spent his 20s with Darkside Snowboards and coaching at Mt. Mansfield Academy before eventually moving west to work with Capita, Coal and Union (C3) in Seattle. “I flew out with a board bag and a backpack, worked for [C3] for eight years until last July,” he says. “From customer service to warranty, customer service manager, and all the way up to North American sales manager. I got to a point where I was in a corner office with a very good salary—successful. But I didn’t feel that way. I wasn’t really engaging with the snowboard community and that’s what’s most important to me. So I left.”
In October ’22 Toohey’s friends organized a preseason party in Seattle. Toohey helped oversee the tuning aspect of the event, which got him thinking about taking a similar show on the road. Thus, the Vroom Vroom Toon Room was born. “By November I shotgun-launched this thing,” Toohey says. “I built my website overnight while parked on government land with no experience in website creation and no business plan.”
Toohey spent most of last season doing grassroots marketing and simply snowboarding as much as possible, logging over 100 days of riding and forging new connections along the way. Through the Vroom Vroom Toon Room he’s linking with lifelong riders and, even more importantly, he says, meeting fledgling snowboarders who don’t have much knowledge when it comes to board maintenance. He’s using his time with new snowboarders as an opportunity to give back to the community by educating and empowering people who could also become lifers themselves. In addition to tuning boards, Toohey’s hosting workshops to show people how to maintain their boards and imparting additional valuable information in the process.
“The puzzle I’m trying to solve is reaching people in the community who are new and maybe bought their gear online, instead of from a shop kid who is going to let them know that they’ve got to come in to get it tuned,” Toohey explains. “They could be riding these $700 snowboards that require frequent tuning for the base to not get packed full of contaminants and become brittle. How long are they going to stick around if their board isn’t good? Somebody’s got to take responsibility and help these people, or we’ll lose them, and we don’t want to lose them.”
As far as Toohey knows, the Vroom Vroom Toon Room is the first of its kind. Is it the next million-dollar idea? Toohey just returned from commercial fishing in Alaska, so plans to retire on the Toon Room revenue are unlikely. But that’s not the point. “I want the business side to be successful, but what’s most important to me is showing up as an ally,” Toohey says. “I’m on a quest for culture and community.”
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