The Snowboarder's Journal • The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4 • PETE SAARI’S CREATIVE KITCHEN

Every stick has a story. Some cherished memories from Pete Saari’s personal collection at home in Port Angeles, WA, early winter 2022. Photo: Tim Zimmerman

It’s a sunny fall day at Banana Way in Carlsborg, WA. Seems like it’s always sunny in Carlsborg, on the northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula, in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. Pete Saari’s busy at the Mervin Manufacturing compound, fulfilling his duties as vice president of creativity. Now 58, Pete’s been working there his whole adult life alongside Mike Olson and assorted long-term creative comrades, building and growing Gnu, Lib Tech, Bent Metal Binding Works, and now ski, surf and wake-surfing programs. Pete has his hands in almost every aspect of the business, from long-term growth strategies to daily engagement with the factory floor and everything in between.

Recently, Pete and his family—including partner, Annette, and their kids Hoko and Ailo—moved to the peninsula full time. It was always the plan, but one expedited by the COVID pandemic. They’re about 10 minutes from Banana Way now, with a selection of cold-water waves not too far afield, the mountains a half hour above, biking and hiking and other natural draws at their fingertips. That means the family can work and play in the same day. And the lines between work and play are often blurred, whether testing new snowboard shapes at Hurricane Ridge or new surf designs at the coast.

Today, Pete’s trying to turn off his firehose of obligations so we can go surf. It takes him till noon. That’s when we meet at his house in a field a few steps from a high bluff overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There’s a nearly done skate bowl just off the driveway, about to be poured. That’ll happen in a few days. Today, we’ll load up his well-travelled 2000 Ford van and make the winding drive to the coast to surf a favorite beach break. It’ll be empty, chest-high, foggy and fun.

Pete runs with the energy of a lifelong board-riding addict. He still rips—in 2016, he took home gold duct tape in the Grand Masters division of the Mt. Baker Legendary Banked Slalom. Catch him in the water or on the hill, and you’ll see that energy in play, a flow that never ends. Surf, snow and skate are part of his daily routine, interwoven with the myriad responsibilities of running a business and raising a family. He and Annette live a fully integrated lifestyle driven by board sports, one that allows them to stay in the kitchen when it comes to cooking up market-friendly passion projects and maintaining an extended work/play family of folks dedicated to expanding the horizon of snow-sliding and beyond.

With a small surf quiver in the back, the van beeps as we pull out of the driveway. Pete assures me it will stop. We launch into conversation; one of three we will have over the next few days. He answers my questions with a circular cadence, a thought process that goes micro to macro and back again. Context is key for Pete. And he always arrives at a reasonably clear conclusion. It’s emblematic of a man who has worked by feel for much of his life, but always with a big picture on the horizon.

We roll tape. Later, he’ll write a series of anecdotal intricacies that help color between the lines of our meandering dialogue. What follows is our conversations, edited for length and clarity, and interspersed with a few of the many first-person highlights he’s created by chasing a life in the toy factory.

We got some work done and now we’re not working anymore. Maybe you’re working, but I am driving to the beach.

We live in Agnew. It’s technically Port Angeles, but we’re in the Sequim School District. We’ve had a place out here for about 12 years near the Mervin factory, and we were always gonna move here. But when the pandemic hit, Annette and I decided to bail and move. The first day we started working remotely, everybody had been practicing for 20 years and our Teams meetings worked perfectly. We were able to mix work with a lot more surf. I think it helped us emotionally get through the psycho-ness of everything that was going on in that two-year period.

One of the silver linings of COVID for us was that we could surf when there were waves and snowboard when there was snow and still get work done. It allowed us to blend our work lifestyle into shred lifestyle a little more like pro snowboarders do. You still put in the long hours, but you could flex a bit.

I was born in Denver, lasted nine months there, and then we moved to Seattle. Then my parents moved to Paris for two years when I was in first grade, then to New York City for two years. We came back here when I was in fifth grade, and I’ve been in Washington [state] since.

Jack—well John Charles, but he goes by Jack—and Peggy. My mom passed about eight years ago, but she’s Peggy and she’s a powerful lady. We lost her to cancer. She was diagnosed and about a month later she was gone. It was painful, but I’m kind of grateful that it went quick. You watch some people have this slow memory loss, for years…

I moved back to be near my parents when I was 45. I had such good moments with my parents at that time, and my mom especially. Ideally, she would’ve gone another 10 or 15 years, but that got cut short. When you lose somebody, you realize that you can bring ’em with you anywhere you want. So I got her with me all the time now. Still, it was hard. She literally died in my arms.

They were teachers. My dad was a [University of Washington] college professor—he taught biochemistry to first-year med students. He did ophthalmology and he was a research scientist. I used to work in his lab as a kid. My mom was a schoolteacher and became a stay-at-home mom, then she was president of the League of Women Voters and was really politically active in Washington state for a whole bunch of different things.

She was. I was the gopher in the ophthalmology lab. I worked for everybody, xeroxing, going to the library and researching stuff and then messing around in my dad’s lab. I did that as a kid, but when I went to UW, I did it as a job.

My dad was just going through graduate school and did his post-doc at the Pasteur Institute for some badass scientists that ended up getting Nobel Prizes. I was just a kid in Paris, and I got thrown into French schools. It was the middle of first grade, and I remember the first day sitting there, looking at the teacher and being pissed off because I couldn’t understand a word they said. By the time we left, I could speak French well enough that the French teachers didn’t know I was English [speaking] anymore—they just thought I was a shitty student [laughs].

Annette’s family lives in Berlin and so we trick them into going to the coast of France and meeting there so we can surf. Then I get to use French. But I don’t get to use it too often. We used to sponsor Mathieu Crépel and that was fun because he spoke French. I’ve gotten some good French friends from over the years ’cause we were part of Quiksilver for a while and they have offices in France.

We moved enough that when I came to Seattle, I started playing soccer and the kids on the soccer team were kind of dicks. I didn’t enjoy it. So I started skateboarding and fell in love. That set me on a path of skateboarding, which sent me into board sports, into BMX and skiing and then snowboarding.

With skateboarding, I could do it any time I wanted and there was nobody telling you what to do. I loved all the technical advancement of skateboarding in the ’70s. Trucks were new; they were just discovering how to make good bushings. They had just figured out urethane wheels. I wasn’t doing that math, but I was shopping through it, and I was a nerd trying to figure out: What systems work best for me, what trucks, what board? I had a lightweight G&S FibreFlex, 23-inch kicktail. A lot of people had big oak boards, but I couldn’t kick turn those. They were too heavy. All that to say, moving around is what brought me into board sports.

Not as tech as [Mike] Olson, but I love equipment. As we started building snowboards, it was about building the best snowboards in general—initially it was just studying what worked best for us and then it was studying what worked best for other people.

The actual ocean is a two-hour drive from Seattle. I had hiked along the Washington coast extensively with my family as a kid and seen waves on some school trips, but I wasn’t sure if you could ride them, or what riding them would look like. I knew how beautiful it was and loved the wild feeling of the forest meeting the beach, and the tide pools and sea life.

I had a neighbor, Tom, who surfed in California and went charter fishing in Westport and said he had seen a surfer there by the jetty—that was the first I had heard of a surfer in Washington. It was exciting to know it was possible. I went to the downtown libraries in Seattle, and they were loaded with surf books from the ’50s and ’60s—there were books on travel and shaping and step-by-step learning. One was The Surfers Almanac: An International Surfing Guide, and in it was a two-page chapter on Washington and Oregon. It mentioned a few spots and sounded like it was mostly unexplored wilderness.

After high school, I saved up some money mowing lawns and two friends and I drove down the coast in a Chevy Nova looking for adventure and waves. We stopped in Santa Cruz and rented Morey Doyles from the Westside surf shop that had logo art by Jimbo Phillips, surfed the Cowell Beach sandbar for two days and it was incredible—the bar was perfect and day one we were getting long rides down the line. I was stoked out of my mind. One of my buddy’s nicknames was “Gerk.” I was really excited and kept yelling, “Gerk! Gerk!” which sounded like “Shark! Shark!” One local longboarder gave us a proper talking to. We were absolute kooks, but the stoke was not going to be denied.

We then drove farther down the coast, sleeping in the car, or on the ground next to it, all the way to Los Angeles and ended up in Newport Beach. We went into a shop and said we wanted to buy two used boards, but all we had was $60 each. He took us to the used rack and there were two 7-foot single fins: a Sunset Swallow and a rounded pin Plastic Fantastic. That was the last bit of money we had and we were a long way from home, but we bought the sticks and some soft racks, and surfed our way home.

Going home we broke down in San Francisco and slept in the streets outside the garage that was repairing our car for a couple nights. But we made it home, and now we had boards. Gerk and I started driving to Westport in his Ford Pinto, camping in the parking lot and surfing as much as we possibly could. We met the small local surf crew there. Gerk met a gal and faded out of my surf world, but I had my own VW bug by then and converted it into a camper of sorts by taking the back seat out and putting in a plywood platform. Once I met Mike Olson, Mervin Lessley and John Heine, we’d explore Washington and northern Oregon in search of waves. We built our own surfboards and eventually got good cold-water wetsuits—I’d been in a thrift-shop dive suit at first, then upgraded to a thick, used beaver-tail dive suit that rashed the shit out of me, and booties that were so tight I couldn’t get them off when my hands were cold.

Over the years we found a few gems and got to name them. I still hear people using some of the names we gave spots today. The journey into the unknown and potential for discovery is as good or better than the surfing itself. It’s a bit different now because everyone one has great wetsuits and boards, but the swell changes every day and the adventure and discovery is still out there if you are willing to work for it.

A friend of mine in high school, Steve Bolenger, knew this guy named Mervin. Mervin had one of the only vert ramps in Washington at the time. I had grown up skating, skiing and racing bikes. I was done racing BMX and I wanted to start doing something else. In Skateboarder Magazine I noticed all my favorite skateboarders were surfers—guys like Gregg Weaver and Larry Bertlemann. So, I decided in high school that I wanted to surf but didn’t know how I was going to do it.

Through Steve I met Mervin, who was friends with Mike. I had gone down to California with a couple friends and bought a used single fin. We had surfboards, but I wanted to start making my own surfboards. Mike was down in Burien, and he was making surfboards for Mervin. In ’83 or ’84 Mervin introduced me to Mike. We chatted with Mike about surf, building surfboards and getting materials because Mervin wanted to build boards too. We both ended up building boards in a garage together.

At the time there were almost no surfers in Washington—just a small, older crew at Westport. They were in their mid-30s and they were either Vietnam vets or fishermen or maybe both, but there were only about 12 of them. Then there were just a few of us young kids, and Mike, myself, John Heine and Mervin became a crew. We skied together, snowboarded together, and traveled the coast and explored all the surf spots together. That set my path through life.

Both Mike and Mervin are amazingly positive people, and they were inspiring. They’re doers. Mervin was a contractor and he just built things. And Mike is a creative genius. They opened my mind to the idea that anything’s possible.

When I first snowboarded with those guys, they gave me a loaner five-fin snowboard that Mike had made. He’d been building boards since ’77. We went up to Ski Acres [now Summit at Snoqualmie Central, WA] and it was a pow day. First run, I rode top to bottom and didn’t fall. We rode all day. Those boards had two fins on the side in the front, then three at the tail with a bunch of tail rockers. So when you stood on ’em and tipped the back foot down, you engaged the sidecut. But on hardpack, they didn’t work.

I think it was winter of ’84. Mike was making boards under Gnu. His buddy John had been helping him, but John didn’t really think snowboarding was going anywhere. I’d grown up fantasizing about working in the ski industry for K2. I was floating through college, getting good grades, but didn’t know where I was going with it. And Mike needed help to build boards. Snowboarding was a new sport. Nobody knew that it was gonna be real. So, the question was: Will they ever work on hardpack?

Mike wanted to quit school and build boards. He gave me a job. It was in a horse barn in Burien. Mike cleaned the gutters of the lady’s house for rent. The barn didn’t have much insulation.

We would rout slots along the side of the board to slide the steel edges in, then I would epoxy in the steel edges and wrap ’em with nylon webbing and cinch ’em up tight. We’d come back later and put epoxy sidewalls on ’em.

That first year that I really started working with him, we started experimenting with the first finless, deep-side-cutted boards. We wanted the boards to work at a ski area—an experiment to see if the sport was gonna be more than a backcountry sport.

Olson was responsible for the geometry at that time. He’s kind of a contrarian, so anywhere Sims and Burton went, we were going the opposite way. Those first finless Gnus had wide noses and progressive sidecuts with deep flare at the back foot—the camber was centered at the back foot; everything was synced up under the back foot. When you were on hardpack and you put it on rail, it acted like a fin back there and held. Sims had pointy surf noses and Burtons at the time were pretty straight. They weren’t really using ski theory. We grew up skiing. Mike was using ski-carving theory and mixing that into snowboard theory.

We went up to Mount Rainier in October to test them. We hiked forever and found this dirty, brown, sun-cupped patch. A storm was coming in. The snow was icing up. We took four or five short runs and he asked me, “What do you think? You think it worked?” And I was like, “I think I felt a turn.”

We drove all the way home in near silence, thinking. Later that fall, Mike went down to Bend [OR] and had a day with his brother where he realized it worked amazing. Then, he was all in on snowboards. That season, riding at Ski Acres, I remember looking at the trenches that we made with these progressive radius carving boards—to see those lines from the chairlift was mind-blowing. I knew the sport was gonna be real at that moment. I had to commit to snowboarding, and I had to commit to chasing those dreams. It was the unknown. There was no road map for construction or parts. It was a leap. But my parents supported me because they saw how committed I was.

We decided we needed a brochure that explained the deep sidecut technology and to introduce the Gnu brand to shops and consumers. We went down to Mount Hood, OR, in the summer of ’85 to get some shots. Mike and I were the snowboarders and Scott Miller was our photographer; our skier friend Fred Lomax helped organize it all. We left Seattle early in the morning on a beautiful summer day. We got tickets and rode Timberline’s Magic Mile to the top. At the time there were no snowboard camps, maybe one or two ski race training programs—almost no one there. We tried to shoot but the light was too blown out and Scott wanted to get things right. So we rode until the lifts closed, then stayed up high and waited for the light to get better.

We had no food or water with us and hadn’t eaten all day. By the time the light started to improve at 6 or 7 p.m., it coincided with the temps dropping—we were absolutely starved and pretty miserable. Mike and I focused and worked our way down the mountain trying as hard as we could to get shots. Mike got an air, I had an in-your-face carving sequence (which was actually an incredible heelside turn considering I had fake rubber Sorels with ski boot liners in them and no highbacks) and we got a fun one where Mike grabbed my shirt.

Mervin started when we lost Gnu, in ’88 or ’89. In the mid-’80s, we were building as fast as we could, but that meant one or two boards per day—vacuum-bag one-offs. We got our first shop in Cloverdale, which was a rough part of Seattle. It got to the point where our business partner, Fred Lomax, was very into making money, and Mike and I were very into making boards. It wasn’t that we weren’t into making money, it just wasn’t our priority—we were into building boards to ride ’em.

Fred was a windsurfer and he lined us up with a distributor called Wind Line and, all of a sudden, the snowboarding market blew up. We couldn’t build enough. Mike met Walter Knauder, who ran a factory called Pale Ski in Austria. We built prototypes then went over there and taught them what snowboards were and how we wanted them built and brought them inserts and a few other components they didn’t have, and the concepts, the geometries. They started building us the green Anti-Gravitys and the green Hyper-Carves, the 166 and the 156. We were still building all the prototypes for the team guys like Dan Donnelly, Amy Howat and Carter Turk—I was building all those.

We had one year where Pale only built our boards. Then we went to a trade show and Jamie Salter from Kemper followed Mike in and realized where we were getting our boards built. He met with Pale and Walter and started doing more boards and eventually just bought out the whole production. We realized, anyways, that the Austrian boards weren’t the quality we wanted. The flexes were varying radically. A lot of people loved them, and people did great things on them, but they weren’t as good as what we were making ourselves.

That experience is a big part of what made Mike and I bring all our manufacturing back to the U.S. and do it ourselves—we wanted control over flex, we wanted control over quality. We wanted to be able to experiment, we wanted to be board builders.

We were barely making it. Mike had a bank loan that got spent by someone who might have been more focused on themselves than the business, but we were eventually able to pay that off. We had an investor, Randy Copeland, who believed in snowboarding—he mortgaged his house and ran another business called Printing Control. He gave us business advice. Another friend of Randy’s mortgaged their house. These two older families believed in us and took risks, and we were building boards and selling them. We made money in the Pale years—snowboarding blew up and we sold a lot of boards—but eventually our distributor one year didn’t want to build tools for a new board we had made, the Vertigo, that was a twin with a rolled bottom.

Wind Line had taken over the relationship with Pale. They owed us royalties on boards and they didn’t pay us. In the late ’80s, we lost Gnu. Wind Line took that 400 grand they owed us and used it to buy windsurf gear and later start Nitro. They asked us to work for Nitro and we did—we built all the first Nitro prototypes for them. We did the Pyro with the asymmetric sidecut. We did a bunch of their race boards. But we couldn’t continue to work for them because they didn’t pay us. They had screwed us.

We didn’t have a plan B, but we needed a new name and Mike had built a skateboard as a side project using a lace pattern as a backing and called it a Liberace Technology, ’cause it looked shimmery like a sparkly Liberace suit. So we regrouped and started Mervin Manufacturing and Lib Technologies with Randy, Mike and I owning the business. Randy helped finance it.

Wind Line had told us we couldn’t do this skeleton graphic that our friend Mark Gale had made—they said it would never sell. When we started Lib Tech, we put that graphic on. We were pissed off when we started Lib Tech. When Gnu was built, it was young and fun and friendly. When we started Lib, we had gone through hard knocks. We did skeletons on every board. The first year [1989] we sold about 1,500 Lib Techs—everything we could make, direct to dealers. We were our own distributor and shipped ourselves and built all the boards ourselves. From then on, we were making money, we were able to pay back all our vendors and run a legit business. We were able to buy the Gnu name back a year later for not much money. From then on, we’ve been piecing it together by making smart material decisions, working hard, and pricing the boards in a place that allows us to be profitable.

We were working 12, 14 hours a day, seven days a week. All our friends were partying. One time we stayed up three days straight with no drugs and built boards nonstop. We built our own tooling. We studied materials and figured out that in some cases the least expensive, most environmentally friendly material solution was also the best solution for snowboards. Like wood cores—fast-growing woods that most people didn’t want to use that were light and lively worked great for snowboards. They happened to be some of the less-expensive materials. We didn’t have money, but we had a lot of heart, a lot of passion, some brains, enough athletic talent to ride ourselves—and the whole combination worked for us.

We were weekend warriors. Snoqualmie was the first resort to open to snowboards in Washington state. Soon after, Baker allowed snowboarding and they were open Friday, Saturday and Sunday. A year later they went full time.

We would build boards all week, then bring ’em to riders and go test and ride. We had passes at Snoqualmie so sometimes we would sneak away midweek, especially if it was rainy or slushy—we loved riding in the slush and rain. On the weekends, we would generally go up to Baker. We were good friends with the Howats [who own and operate Mt. Baker Ski Area] and Amy rode for us. Gwyn was our age, and she became our team manager. She was the Gnu team manager for multiple years and a photographer. Amy was our first world champ. We sponsored a lot of the Baker crew: Carter Turk, Dan Donnelly, Mike Ranquet, [Eric] Jenco. Sometimes the mountain would let us stay up there for the weekend and we’d ride opening till closing, riding powder, hiking, getting our fix.

Mike and I were into punk rock and obscure thrift shop tapes, but Matt Cummins had introduced us to the Beastie Boys Licensed to ILL (1986) when it first came out. We used to listen to them on road trips to the mountains all the time. One day I was working alone in our factory on North Pacific by Gasworks Park in Seattle getting ready to layup some boards, and the phone rang. Mike and I never used to answer the phone because if we got on the phone that meant we were gonna get stuck on the phone and not get any work done. But for some reason I picked it up this time, and the guy on the other end introduced himself as Adam from the Beastie Boys. I was feeling a bit sassy and thought for sure this guy was bullshitting. He was saying he wanted to buy a snowboard, so I told him he could if he busted some rhymes right now. He wouldn’t do it and I kept hassling him—he said I wasn’t “cutting him no slack,” but he held his line. Eventually, I figured it out it was actually MCA, and we started sending him boards for quite a few years after that.

He passed way too soon. Looking back at what those guys did, it is amazing seeing how they navigated learning, change and growth. I felt like there were some similarities between their approach and the energy Mike and I brought to our snowboards and life. We worked at a different scale of course, but their work and their projects are still inspiring today.

Our team riders and crew end up being like a big family. In the case of champion snowboarders Barrett Christy and Temple Cummins, they actually got married and became the Cummins family. Barrett won big airs and slopestyle and X Games medals, and Temple is a freestyle-minded freerider who honed his Mt. Baker Legendary Banked Slalom skills gunning for gold duct tape against the world’s best. When Barrett moved out here from Colorado, she applied her shred skills, talent and drive to the LBS as well.

Our entire company becomes race-obsessed for a couple months of the year, fine-tuning boards and obsessing over possible race-winning design concepts and advantages. The conditions vary every year and it’s difficult to win, even if you are the best rider on that day. In 2001, we had the LBS miracle of Gnu team riders Temple and Barrett both winning the Men’s and Women’s pro divisions.

On top of building our own boards, we do all our own ad creative work. We don’t usually get too strategic about ads in the traditional sense. Instead we run things that make us happy, are fun and hopefully stop the page and make people think. We had an ad due shortly after Temple and Barrett won that featured a nice shot of them with their duct tape trophies. I can’t remember who exactly said it—our ad brainstorms were random and often included Olson, me, our designer Steven Cobb and whoever else happened to stroll in—but the concept of “the world’s fastest fuckers” came up as the slogan to celebrate Barrett and Temple’s tremendous wins. I really, really wanted to run it but, out of respect for them and ourselves, it never got done. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that still haunts me to this day.

At first, Mike did the sourcing, geometries and finishing work, but later I learned all those steps and got involved. For the geometries, we would make templates and then we’d blend curves. I really loved that aspect. I started doing more of that until it went all CAD and I had to focus on production management and purchasing.

Mike was always an extremist and I was more of a centrist. Mike would overdesign and experiment just to feel things. He would create boards with radically deep sidecuts or extreme contours. I was more pulling things back, going, “OK, let’s bring him back to reality.” We balanced each other out. Eventually, I became more of a fan of pushing the limits and envelope of design and experimenting with big strokes. But I also was always very aware of what the market would accept.

One of your biggest innovations, and biggest marketing successes, was the Skate Banana. How did that come about?

Rossignol had introduced their minis and we were messing around with those boards. By then we were owned by Quiksilver, and Quiksilver had acquired Rossi. The minis had no engagement between the feet. We thought, “You need rocker between the feet to bring a board like that to life.”

We built one short mini then shelved it because minis were so limited and didn’t think about it for a while. But the concept of rocker between your feet was still alive. Steven and I went down to Mount Hood with a full-rocker Banana Hammock board with micro sidecut that we were experimenting with, and we had a Gnu Danny Kass. There I realized that the rocker board with basically no sidecut felt better in the slush than the camber Danny did at the time—it wasn’t that the Danny felt bad, the rocker just felt good. That’s where we decided to add rocker to a full-sized, sidecut board, but just between the feet.

When we went back, we were just moving to our factory in Sequim, closing our Seattle shop, and we didn’t have time to build the prototype. I had to write the whole brochure and we had to introduce the whole concept for the Skate Banana to our sales reps before we had even ridden it. The rocker between the feet had been done before, but snowboards had been stagnant for 20 years—they’d all been camber, there’d been no change—and we tried to come at it from another way.

The first concept was a 156. Mike, Steven and I teamed up and we built them. I got to ride the first ones because I was the one pushing it the hardest. I got the prototype and it sat in my room for three days. I was kind of nervous because we’d already marketed it to our reps. I’d described how it was gonna be loose, it’s gonna float and carve. It was gonna be pre-bent and carve on hardpack and it was gonna be jibby and work better on ice ’cause it would have lower tip and tail initiation issues. I went up to Snoqualmie. I got off the chair all nervous, thinking I might crash because the thing wouldn’t be controllable. But it rode so nice off the chair and went right into arcs and worked beautifully all the way down the mountain. Then we got Temple on it and he loved the way it carved. The next day we got [Jesse] Burtner on it and he liked it. I asked Mike, “Can we call this thing the Skate Banana?” which was the name he had for the mini project. We agreed. It was on.

Surfing has always been experimental. The basic board-building process allows people to experiment with surf shapes. We brought this kind of experimental thinking back to snowboarding, which was feeling kind of stagnant. It was exciting. It ended up being a great run. We developed all kinds of Skate Banana variations with more hybrid, more camber and it’s still getting experimented with today. Camber’s back which is great, and there are a lot of more refined cambers and a lot of variations on camber. But that Skate Banana opened the door for a lot of creative thinking and a lot of companies to start experimenting more. We started doing boards we knew wouldn’t work, radical designs that we called “art piece snowboards” that didn’t have a function in mind.

Were you self-aware of how this experimentation might play into branding? We always wanted to make a statement. Mike came from the “every day is Halloween world.” He loves attention but he doesn’t like attention. And so he always does these things that speak loudly. We wanted to make a statement every year and have fun. And yeah, it was branding. We had no money and couldn’t afford ads for the first six or seven years of Lib Tech. What we could do was make cool boards. We could make anything we wanted. All our tooling was prototype tooling, so it was affordable to make cool boards. To this day, that’s been one of the keys to our business: We have fairly low-cost tooling that we can do ourselves. We don’t even have to talk to accounting when we want to do an experiment, we just do it.

Our creative kitchen has been a big source of joy. We attract people in with creative minds, whether someone like our first employee, Paul Ferrell, or team riders like Danny Kass or Travis Rice—we have a great crew that’s passionate about making fun toys and improving them. There’s Ben Lardy for Bent Metal Binding Works; Jeff Kempf, our production manager; Apostolos Karabotsos, our prototype manager; Tim Franz, who does preproduction graphic design; Production Manager Jeff Kempf, Crispin Louder, the core shop manager, Surf Engineer Jeff Henderson—too many to name. Everyone wants to improve performance of a board for a rider and a customer, but also wants to have fun. That’s part of branding for sure. But I don’t know if we necessarily look at it as branding and maybe we look at it as our only way of communicating.

Because, as far as business goes, we’ve always been businesspeople. Mike’s good about numbers, and we’ve always made smart business decisions about materials and costs and overhead. But really the drive was and still is to make fun toys and make things that we we’re gonna be proud of later and happy with now. That moment of testing a new toy or a new geometry or a new technology is always one of the biggest thrills of having your own board-building company.

Magne-Traction serrated edges is a product of our design kitchen, where we can build and test concepts within 24 hours. Mike Olson used to ride a 200cm Dough Boy Shredder snowboard for years. He loved the way the long edge contact bent into an arc as you loaded energy into it with a relatively smaller two-footed stance. A long snowboard with two pressure points on it operates efficiently, much like a long ski with one central boot pressuring it into a beautiful flex arc and carve. The only problem Mike had was, to have a deep sidecut with a long board, you ended up with huge, wide tips and tails or a really narrow waist and toe drag. To solve this design challenge, Mike pencil sketched up a concept of reverse curves at your toes that widened the board so your toes wouldn’t drag. The concept looked strange and radical and had Steven and I giggling a bit, but it was also intriguing. You have to respect the unconventional freethinking genius of Mike Olson.

By this time in the evolution of our business, the mid-2000s, Mike and I were buried in the challenges of keeping it running. I handled production and purchasing, and Mike handled all technical support and engineering challenges for day-to-day, future concepts, and quite a bit of banking. Neither of us had time to draw up and build one-off prototypes like we had done in the past. Steven took some CAD classes and focused on that for us. Mike asked to have something built to solve his longboard toe-drag issues. After a few weeks, Steven presented me with a drawing of a board with equal-sized mini-serrations running from tip to tail, saying he couldn’t see Mike’s oversized hockey-skate-esque reverse curves working, but that he liked this microdose of reverse curves inspired by a skip trowel for tiling. He asked if he could build it.

It looked pretty wacky, but I said yes. As I thought about the raw, even-sized serration, it clicked in my head that we could adjust the size of the serrated teeth along the edge to tune the edge hold to perfection. Steven rode the first prototype, and the tip and tail were much too aggressive, so we mellowed the depth of the teeth outside your feet and at the contact points for smooth turn initiation and finishes, while maintaining the aggressive teeth at and between your feet to add edge hold where you needed it most.

We built five prototypes of the design and went to Mt. Baker on a spring day with ice and slush and tested the new design. Everyone loved the serrated edges and Magne-Traction was born. Of course, we had to build bending jigs and all kinds of new tooling, but we put it in the line the next year. We hadn’t solved Mike’s toe-drag issues, but we did improve snowboard performance and edge hold in icy conditions. And we had a good time doing it.

It was Mike with a radical, outside-the-box concept, Steven with his own concept, then me refining it that made it happen. We’ve done quite a few variations on that three-way team to make advancements over the years.

In the early and mid-’90s, snowboarding boomed. Jamie Lynn was a rock star and we had so many orders that we couldn’t build them all. I was running the design crew and managing our production on the floor. We were all about building high-performance, high-quality boards, but we were a young business and we didn’t know how to handle that much growth. We had a badass crew of board builders including Grindline skatepark pioneer Mark “Monk” Hubbard and shredder-lover-snow-and-skate master Scott Stamnes, who both have now passed on. We paid a lot of our craftsmen crew by the board, especially finishers, so they really wanted to crank out boards, which added internal pressure. Maintaining quality standards became a big concern for us and I gave myself the new title of “Production Inhibitor” as I tried to slow the train down and make sure we were always making great boards.

We didn’t ever want titles, but we always had to have business cards, so we made up our own titles. I think mine now is VP of creativity. I still feel like managed growth is a key part of the job today. People always want to be number one and chase success—we like shooting for a solid number three. Success is awesome and we have had some fun wins with Jamie’s models, the Skate Banana and Travis’ Orca, but the pressure to grow that comes with it can really stress a business from all angles. It’s better long-term to build a few less boards and keep your eye on the fundamentals of board building, stay humble, have steady long-term vision and not get too greedy.

Yeah. You wanna compete in the marketplace and you have to make money to stay in business, but I do think what keeps us going is that passion to make new things and expand your mind and create, and help other people create. We work with a lot of different riders on a lot of different boards. It’s really fun to work with Travis [Rice] on boards. He’s immersed in a high-tech world and rubs shoulders with all kinds of different characters in the high plane that he operates in. It’s fun to have him push us. We work with Matt Biolos, who’s a top surfboard shaper. He’s super high-performance in that world, but he loves snowboarding. Creativity comes from so many different angles, and everyone brings new ideas to the table.

It’s not a vertical thing where it’s just X equals Y and we get Z and then we’re done.

Both Mike and I are still passionate, hands-on board builders. We’ve been true to that through whatever challenges economics or business management might present. That’s one of my philosophies: Whenever things get weird financially, just go back to what you do best and do that. For us, that’s building boards. And that’ll lead us through any situation. Board building is a nonstop, spinning process and it feeds itself. We always run at the outer limits of our capabilities. We run Gnu, Bent Metal Bindings, Lib Tech surfboards, Lib Tech wakeboards, and Roxy snowboards. We’ve had investors over the years, and you always want things to go well for them and you want to keep doing this because we know this is our world and this is our little oasis.

In some ways, we’ve had to work harder than you would ever work in a regular career. But it hasn’t felt like work and there’s been a lot of desperate moments over the years financially, just piecing a business together. It’s always behind the scenes. It’s never as glorious as it might look. If we were looking to just make money and float on the cream, nothing would’ve happened as it did. We would’ve gone out of business a long time ago.

After the big boom in the ’90s, snowboarding went from like 400 brands to 20. During that boom, demand massively exceeded supply. Still, we were just board builders doing our normal thing, but the writing was on the wall that snowboarding was gonna collapse. Randy Copeland, our financial partner, wanted to step away and do other things.

We’re surfers. Quiksilver was doing well at the time. We thought to ourselves, “Who do we want to work with, if we can work with anybody?” Quiksilver is who came to mind. We arranged a meeting and, at first, they were skeptical. After some back and forth, Mike went down and pitched them one last time and they agreed to the deal.

Initially, they were really good. Danny Kwock and Bob McKnight took care of us—they gave everybody in the company stock options. And that was great because their stock—[Mervin media’s Tim] Stanny [Stanford], for instance, bought his house with Quiksilver’s stock options.

Then, for the longest time, we ran our business without any interference from Quiksilver. Eventually, we got a CEO named Bill Bussiere who would come up once per month to visit us. We had a strong CFO, Sandy Jenkins, who made sure we did what we said we were gonna do financially. Things went really well. But the snowboard industry was crashing, and Forum took off with Mack Dawg, and Jamie got hurt. All that hot momentum that we’d had with Dave Lee and Todd Schlosser, Jamie, and Joey McGuire and all that, that energy was still there. But it was Peter Line’s turn. It was the whole crew from Salt Lake’s turn with Forum. And they steamrolled. We were cruising along doing our thing, but we didn’t have as many sales as we had capacity at that time. So we started doing Roxy Snowboards with Quik and that went well. It helped our business. Then Barrett came along and dominated. She was a big engine for us in terms of building Gnu. Danny Kass did his thing and there was the whole Grenade movement, and Gnu had another reinvention with Zach Leach and Kyle Clancy and Hampus Mosesson and Temple. Now Temple and his son Cannon have a board together.

There’ve been times in our lives where we’re like, “What are we gonna do? How are we gonna save Lib Tech? How are we gonna save Gnu?” And it’s flip-flopped back and forth. Now both Gnu and Lib Tech are doing well. Jamie came back and got healthy again, EJack [Eric Jackson] and [Chris] Rasman grew up with us, and Austen Sweetin, Phil Hansen and Fredi Kalbermatten came in and offered their unique take on snowboarding. We’ve had a bunch of amazing riders over the years that have joined us. Torah Bright was riding Roxy with Magne-Traction on her board. That all flowed into the Skate Banana, and Travis’ belief in hybrid contours was big. Blake Paul rides hybrid. Brandon Reis rides full-on rocker, then Forest Bailey and EJack like camber, so now we have this diversity in our lines, driven by the riders. Every rider on the team provides valuable feedback to the board-building process. Jamie Anderson has been huge for Gnu and pushing an accessible-yet-high-performance board line. Same goes for Max Warbington.

Mike and I used to have completely different opinions on how boards rode. We would argue about what worked and what didn’t, and what we felt, and flexes and sidecuts and overall geometries. It took me the longest time to realize that he rides goofy foot and he is left-footed, while I’m goofy foot but right-footed. So I tend to weight the frontfoot a little more and he is back-foot-powerful. I used to look at the surfers that were front-foot-heavy, like Tom Curren, and he loved the back-foot-heavy surfers like Tom Carroll. The difference between somebody who weights their back foot and their front foot is so radical and the experience you have with the boards can lead to completely different conclusions. Maybe 20 years ago, I figured out that if I wanna feel a board like Mike does, I have to ride switch. Then I’m back-foot-heavy and get to feel what he’s feeling.

I think they were always a little frustrated with us. They left us alone and they wanted us to grow, and we tried some different things to grow, but we only stayed a certain size. We did great as a business and we were always profitable—one year we were the most profitable business in terms of percentages in Quiksilver.

It’s hard to grow hard goods. You have to do a good job and be profitable. And you take growth when you can get it. But to chase growth is a tricky thing in snowboarding. If you get that growth window, great—like the past COVID years, it’s been booming to the point where we can’t even meet demand—you take that and you do what you can with it. But sometimes you just have to say, “No, we can’t grow that fast. It’s not sustainable.” Nobody, no matter how hot a brand, can carry double-digit growth year after year for decades.

It’s like being a band and trying to write a hit song. You make songs and you make songs and then some of ’em are hits and some aren’t. But because you love music, you keep making music regardless of whether you’re making the greatest hit that you’ve ever made. We always liked the Melvins because they would just put out music—it felt like they put out what they wanted to put out and they didn’t really care about whether it was commercial or not. But they’re prolific. They keep putting out albums and they keep creating and reinventing themselves. That’s sort of where we try to be.

Peter Schroff was one of our surf-shaping heroes—he was one of the artsy kings of Newport surf culture when it went off with marketing guru Danny Kwock and Quiksilver in the early ’80s, and he turned surfboards into amazing, sculptural, unrideable works of art. I always loved his shapes and distastefully outrageous-but-tasteful style. As we grew a bit and got better at the production aspect of board building, we began experimenting more and more with snowboard shapes and improving performance. A byproduct of that was that I started drawing completely unrideable boards that were intended to be art only and used as POP displays for retailers. One of the early ones I called Femme Fatal. It had a curvy feminine shape with inserts at each nipple, one for the belly button and a triangle of inserts at the private area. One of our favorite board-builder shredder artists Nick Russian did the art and it came out beautiful.

We named our small design R&D crew the ExperiMental division, and Steven Cobb, Mike Olson and I built a lot of fun, semi-to-absolutely nonfunctional shapes for various occasions. We would bring them to trade shows to display on the wall every year. We made a board shaped like a raven, a Jamie Lynn cat with ears at the tip, a comet-shaped board, and one shaped like an actual banana that shouldn’t have worked, but Jason Robinson ripped on it. Steven did some amazing ones along the way including the Wiffle Tip, Pow Pod and Little Man in the Canoe or Chugash. I have a sketchbook full of shapes we have yet to build. This year, the ExperiMental division that now includes Andy Audette, worked with me to help develop a fun stick called the Steely D that’s a function-first ATV ripper with a 3D spoon nose, which should be fun.

I am more of a hike-for-powder guy, but when we were part of the Quiksilver family, [CEO] Bob McKnight would invite us on heli trips to Tyax in BC. Helis are awesome—Bob always said the thumping noise heli rotors made was “fun-fun-fun-fun-fun-fun.” I ended up in a heli with Jamie Lynn and Billy Anderson. Usually with a heli on a recreational trip, you can’t really scope a run. You have to be conservative, so you don’t end up flying off a cliff or into a crevasse—you usually see the perfect air after you went past it and it’s too late and you are off to another perfect pow field you don’t know anything about.

On this morning Jamie, Billy and I found ourselves a little separated from the group above a mile-and-a-half-long gully that snaked down the side of the run we were supposed to be on. It held an endless series of corners and waterfall-like hips with visible landings. Snow crystals were hanging in the air in a strange fog that didn’t limit your visibility at all but refracted the light in colorful, prismatic rainbow sheet waves. We didn’t say anything and dropped into this video game of a run that just kept giving and giving.

Jamie rides with full commitment and speed at all times and Billy is a complete ripper beast himself, so of course I was third in the train. But I got to watch Jamie methods and front threes with Billy matching them with his own blasts all the way down, then, about five seconds later, I got to hit each hip or lip to perfect transition myself. As we met the group again, we didn’t say much.

Years later I mentioned the run to Jamie as being one that stuck out in my mind. He remembered it immediately and said it was the best run of his life. I think it might have been mine, too.

Quiksilver bought Rossignol and then Quik got in trouble because Rossi was as big as Quik, and Quik was at the top of their game. Quik anchored up to a big ship that was kind of sinking. Once they did that, they had to look for money everywhere to try to shore up their business. Suddenly, it became unhealthy for us because even though we were still profitable, they were desperate to find money to make up for this $600 million debt that they’d taken on.

There was never a rift or a moment where we disappointed them. We always did what we said we were gonna do. But they decided that they were selling off a few brands and we were one of them. We met with a bunch of people and Altamont was the group that was the most excited about Mervin. They bought Huf, Lakai, Girl Skateboards, Dakine, Fox and a couple others. We all worked together through this central spine. There were some challenges with it, but their vision was a good vision.

Still, it’s hard to chase growth. Altamont has sold most everybody but us and we’re still with them almost 10 years later because we’re doing what we say we’ll do—owe’re not surprising them financially, and we’ve been able to come up with some innovative products to move forward. That’s allowed our relationship with Altamont to be healthy, and they’ve been happy with us. We’ll probably end up with a new financial partner at some point here in the next few years.

We’ve done well with Altamont and they’ve been great to us. They’re willing to invest in the factory, in tooling, and let Mike do his job, let me do my job, let Jesse [Burtner] and our CEO Anthony DeRocco and the whole crew do their jobs.

Mike and I grew up in the ’70s. There were gas shortages and environmental crises and there was the first push for solar and wind power. We both were influenced by our parents’ love of the outdoors. When we started the business, we didn’t have much money and materials were hard to source, so we had to be really efficient with materials. That created a culture of efficiencies from the start. As we grew, that stayed with us. Also, we’d built some surfboards, and I actually got so sick from the polyester [fumes] that I had to go to the hospital.

As we built our first factory in Seattle, we didn’t want a toxic shop. Mike researched which resins were the least toxic and found the safest epoxies. When we started to bring in other employees—Paul Ferrel was employee number one, then we hired my brother [Chris] and a few others—we didn’t want to pollute anyone else’s lives.

Even as we got better financially, we still were careful about not wasting anything. We started developing recycling and figured out non-toxic ways to print the graphics through in-house sublimation using water-based inks. We figured out how to build top sheets out of beans. All of this was driven by not only wanting to be environmentally nicer, but also wanting to source cheaper, more easily accessible materials and handle every step of the product in house.

When we moved to Carlsborg, we figured out how to recycle all the sawdust from our cores. We bring that over to our neighbor Anjo Soils and they mix it with manure and compost it. I actually skied the sawdust pile this year—a first descent of the north side of Mt. Mervin as we call it. It was literally half-manure and it was the world’s shittiest run [laughs]. The first snowboard descent is still on the table.

I think there are around 160 right now. Having the factory is like having a tiger by the tail and if you fail in any way, you hear it from the market. There are a lot of nuances to board building—making slippery plastic bond to other unlike material is challenging. You have to keep your eye on it constantly. Even though we’ve got tight tolerances on everything, wood varies, the amount of resin people use varies, so you have to set up consistent procedures. I check flexes almost every day. Mike still does a lot of troubleshooting. Quality control and troubleshooting is constant.

But the upside of all of this is working in a fun, healthy environment where we can continue to make great toys. This reverence we have for creation has attracted so many good people. A lot of the people that make it all work have been with us for 20, even 30 years. They bring their creative energy to this space, and we’ve made it, as much as we can, into a board-sports oasis where people can build toys. We try to employ people year-round, which can be challenging in a seasonal board-sports industry, and allow everyone involved to have some fun.

At some point, maybe my retirement is just building fun boards that aren’t meant for market. We have a toy factory and a kitchen we get to cook in. Mike’s still working on new constructions—he came up with a brand-new construction this year that’s gonna be really exciting—we’re gonna put it on Travis’ board and Mike’s favorite board, the Cygnus BM. I call it the Cygnus Big Mike. Recently, we built a board that had a bunch of layers of carbon, and visually it came out amazing. It was fun to see Mike’s eyes light up, just like they did when we were kids.

You want everybody to be happy the whole way along the process. The guy that’s making the wood core, the guy that’s edging, all the way down to the rider, and their experience. Once you get all that in place and they can share that with the world, then you have a magical story.

At this point, almost 40 years in, why wouldn’t you just cash out and go surfing?

We love board building. I mean, I kind of want to cash out and go surfing for like a week or two [laughs]. But I find this business grounding. Part of it might be mental health. This is what we know, this is what we do, this is what feels good. We do it and we keep doing it and we’ve been able to avoid getting normal jobs, but in the end, we work twice as hard to avoid that. I think Mike feels the same way. He could bail out and go surfing. I think his wife might want him to. But Mike can’t do his job from Mexico. It’s like being an author or a photographer or an artist. You do it ’cause you love it.

You’re 58 now and you’re super-active—surfing, skating, snowboarding, mountain biking. Do you feel like a certain amount of that stoke comes from the fact that you’re grinding away trying to make better tools for these activities?

I’ll go snowboarding or surfing no matter what, but it’s always more fun to go up and ride something new, which you made. And if you do get a breakthrough, that’s always fun to share with the masses, and it’s exciting. Mike and I were in the factory today looking at this new construction we made for Travis Rice’s board going, “That might be the sickest thing we’ve ever made.”

Paul Ferrel and Itchy Life When we were in our early 20s, Mike and I hired our friend, snowboard/skateboard shredder Paul Ferrel, as our first Mervin employee. He has been with us ever since and done some amazing things, including winning the Mt. Baker Legendary Banked Slalom Pro Men’s division and introducing us to Jamie Lynn. He currently runs the product design and production for our BMBW binding program and a host of other projects.

In those early days, we had metal templates we cut our fiberglass out of using a utility knife. Paul was a materials prep guy, so one of his jobs was to cut glass for the next day’s lay-up. It was one of our least favorite jobs because you got tons of itchy, furry fiberglass on everything you were wearing.

I let Paul live in the back room of a small lakeside basement spot I was renting to help him keep his expenses down—none of us were making much money at the time—and we used to commute to work together. Mike and I were meticulous about being clean—not getting resin or fiberglass on us and having special work gear and shoes that we didn’t wear home—but Paul wasn’t as concerned as we were.

One fall morning, Paul got up and put his unbelievably fiberglass-covered kit on from the day before. He was making toast and I went to the bathroom and started getting my shit together for the day and came back out. Meanwhile, Paul decided to crawl into my bed and get cozy under the covers in his sparkly, practically shimmering, completely fiberglass-covered pants and sweatshirt. For me, an experienced “abrasive technician” who spent every day in the shop building boards, who did not want itchy at home—that was as big a personal space violation as you could get. He had his classic, shit-eating-rascal-little-brother grin on his face when I called him out for the offense, and he left a trail of sparkles everywhere behind him. Board building wasn’t a job, it was itchy life.

When you eventually do exit, what would you like your legacy to be in this world?

I don’t see myself ever exiting. I think we’re gonna continue making toys no matter what. Snowboarding’s pretty hard on your body. I might end up surfing more than snowboarding, but I got young kids that are learning to ski and snowboard and are psyched on surfing. So, I’m gonna stay. I still love it.

My legacy? I’ve had some moments that I’m proud of over the years, but I think mostly I’m grateful that we’ve been able to work with all these amazing people and watch people grow up and do amazing things and we’ve been able to share all of that.

Your boy Jeff Galbraith [founder and publisher of this title], we watched him when he was a student at Western Washington University [in Bellingham, WA]. He was part of the crew that we used to flow boards to at Baker, then he became the editor of Snowboarder Magazine, then he started his own publication against all odds and continues to do it. You get to see stories like this all around you. To watch amazing people do great things has been a privilege. I guess I want us to be known as some good folks that worked our asses off to do fun things in board sports and treated people well. Ideally, we would be beacons to say: You can do it. Just be good to other people and work your ass off and believe in yourself and don’t ever back off.

If there’s any lesson to take from our story, it’s that we kept pushing at what we loved. In the beginning, it was like, “You’re gonna surf Washington? There’s no surf in Washington.” And then with snowboarding it was like, “Snowboarding, what are you guys doing? You can’t surf the snow.” There were nonstop naysayers. Hopefully we’ve inspired some people to do their best and stick with what they love.

I call myself the VP of Creativity, but I’m the VP of marketing and design at Mervin. I oversee the marketing department, I oversee snow product, I oversee the …Lost project with Matt [Biolos], so I work on making sure we pick the right [surf]boards that we do with him. And Steven [Cobb] and I work closely with Matt on all his snowboard stuff as well. On the design side, I have worked with Annette [Veihelmann] and Bish [Shawn Bishop] on all the catalogs and all the visuals and branding for Lib and GNU and write copy, clean the toilets…

I end up feeling kind of empty if I’m not paying attention to the riders and the market, the industry and our business and the day to day. I love the boards.

Can you tell me about your surf program? How much of the business is it at this point?

It’s maybe a 10th of the size of the snowboard business, which is pretty big in the surf world. At the start, building snowboards was work and surfing was play for us. But we have always built surfboards too, for ourselves. Then, Mike had some unique construction ideas, and he was trying to make a better surfboard. That’s a really hard thing to do, but he figured out ways and now we have a process no one else is using. Mike put at least 10 years into it while I picked up some of the focus on snow.

He’s a character. He’s gruff. He’s a punk rocker. He used to sing in a punk band. He came from the ’90s, a wild era of surfing. But he’s a super-hard-working, highly motivated person and he is really smart. He’s a good dude and he has become a friend. He runs the biggest women’s program in surfing. He takes care of so many people. His pros ride our boards too. He has helped people see us as legit in the surf industry.

I consulted Tim “Stanny” Stanford before this conversation and he had a question for you: what’s with the hair?

Well, when I was a kid, I had an afro. I couldn’t comb my hair. It was the ’70s, when everyone styled their hair, and it was kind of a struggle as I discovered who I was. In my 20s, I kinda got used to it. But in my 30s, it started falling out and I started looking like my forehead was growing, but I still had the afro. I hi,t that day—probably in my mid-30s—where I was like, “It’s gotta go. I can’t do this anymore.” I shaved it all off. I’ve been mowing the lawn for 20 years since, once per week.

I still identify as bald, but my kids wanted me to grow my hair out this summer, so I started growing it and I just kept growing it—it’s an experiment. I was trying to get my afro back, I wanted to look like Art Garfunkel. But I’m kinda looking like Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The kids won’t let me cut it; they like to pet me nowadays ’cause we haven’t let them get a pet yet, ’cause we travel too much, so I’m father pet. We’ll see where it goes from here. I think, if it keeps going, I’m gonna run the double-braided Willie Nelson. We’ll see if I can make it that far [laughs].

I first saw her at La Push [on the west coast of the Olympic Peninsula] and we were both in different romantic situations. But I met her there, and eventually she came to work at Mervin, and we both ended up single. We worked together so much that we eventually grew close. We had to navigate a few dating-somebody-at-work challenges, but we’ve made it work. We work together closely and live together and have a family together. And believe it or not, it seems to be working great. She’s an honest, hardworking person and I guess I am too. We’ve been able to make it work for the rest of the people around us, so there was never any disruption there. If anything, we overcompensated by putting in even more effort and being extra clear with work boundaries.

Love is an unpredictable thing and that wasn’t the easiest path, but now life couldn’t be better. We have everything in common and she brings a whole lot to my world. She’s an amazing mom. With the amount of energy we both pour into our work life and then our board-sports life, I don’t think we could have made other relationships work like this one has. But with both of us doing the same thing, we had time for each other and time for the relationship. We have an all-in work, surf, snowboard lifestyle. If we’re not going to the mountains, we’re going to the beach. And if we’re not doing that, we’re working on creative for Mervin.

Yeah. She came from Germany and got a degree at Western [Washington University] in graphic design. She started out doing graphic design for us, and then she worked her way up to managing all our other designers. These days they have become so strong, and Lib has grown so much, that she focuses on Lib.

Sometimes you just have to listen. I had presented Travis Rice with the idea of doing some sort of fun shape and hadn’t heard anything back for quite a while. He finally touches down from one of his movie projects and calls with an idea for a board he wants to call the Orca. He has tried a few of the “fish” shapes that are out there and feels like they are watered-down, powerless versions of snowboards that don’t suit his riding. He wants something with more power off the tail in powder and hardpack, but that still has that short-tail sinkability and maneuverability to navigate tight, complex terrain, spine lines at full Travis aggression levels. Cobb, Travis and I continue to discuss what is essentially an extremely directional C2 hybrid contour with a tight camber and sidecut under and behind the back foot, ending abruptly and maximizing back-foot power on a short tail. The nose is a long, floaty, smooth-entry early rise with a mellow-entry sidecut.

Travis finally shows up in town with napkin drawings and we discuss the project further and decide the contours are possible. Steven begins drawings. We want to give it a unique look. A little inspired by the Hosoi Hammerhead skateboard from back in the day but adapted for both snow and snowboard production, Steven arrives at a final shape and contour that pushes our finishers as far as we dare. The first size is 153, which is tiny for Travis, but making toys that don’t quite fit in the box is our favorite thing.

We built a few prototypes and got them on hill in mixed conditions. The powder performance was epic, as expected. Travis loved it and wanted even more camber in the tail. What was unique was how distinct and positive the hyper-cambered tail and corresponding deep sidecut felt on hardpack. This powder-minded stick is actually a directional hardpack resort ripper in disguise. Graphically, Travis wanted to go over the top: bright blue with a giant Orca. Travis’s friend Mark Dunstan crushed that job. Annette comped up a few toned-down “easy seller” versions, but we kept going back to Travis’s original request for the full send.

Ironically, the hardest part about this entire project was pushing it through our internal SKU-cutting-minded business team and getting it in the line. After much spirited internal debate, we were able to get one size of this model added to Travis’ line. I knew the board would do well, but none of us had any idea it would do what it did. It has been a half a dozen years now and the Orca has been the number-one-selling snowboard [according to SIA data] for multiple years. We have worked with Travis on multiple variations including his Natural Selection winning Golden Orca multidirectional version. It was exciting and satisfying to see him come from behind and dominate the last event of the three in AK and win the overall title on a dream board—sometimes it all comes together.

Travis’s enthusiasm and drive to explore what doesn’t exist is a perfect match for our ExperiMental Division. His next year’s boards look insane, with Olson getting really involved and adding some ultralight new core materials and carbon fiber, me and the ExperiMental crew taking a little weight off the tip and tails. Travis keeps pushing and we keep exploring and expanding our minds and capabilities.

Recently, my seven-year-old Ailo and I had an amazing mini-session surfing by ourselves. The sun was out, not a breath of wind... magical little crisp peelers. I was coaching him into the spot and helping him pick waves, and he was paddling into waves and trimming down the line and excitedly paddling back out over waves screaming—classic surf dad moments.

Later that day the surf was overhead, and the kids were on the beach playing in a little shack we built at the high tide line. I came in from my session and stepped over the beach logs and seaweed to where Ailo was sitting and playing, and as I looked down, I saw a dead seal wrapped in the kelp with its head bit cleanly off, still bleeding. I looked down at it and then at his smiling face and back at it and didn’t say anything. I surfed that spot alone for the next few days and it felt a little different.

No, we’re not married. At some point we might run off to Fiji and get waves and get married. We’ve been talking about it recently. Our kids are asking us if we’re married or not, and they kind of want us to get married. I think it would be a fun party for us to do as a family. We’d be doing it for the right reasons, and it would be a fun addition to our relationship. But it hasn’t been our highest priority. We’re committed—we’re completely committed to each other, so there hasn’t been any urgency to get married.

I have Paavo, who is 23. He is from an earlier marriage that I was in. He is doing awesome. Annette helped parent him and did an amazing job helping him from his grade school level all through high school. And he had another mom, basically—that was Natasha, [Lib Tech team rider] Matteo [Soltane]’s mom, who also helped with him. He has turned out to be a rock-solid kid. We had a day snowboarding about seven years ago where I realized that he was snowboarding better than I was.

I had mixed feelings. I got an ego, so it hurt a little, but then I was also proud of him, so that felt great. He graduated from Western [Washington University] a year or so ago and majored in digital design and business and creative writing. He landed a job as a content creator for a small company that does online brand management. He’s got a great girlfriend and a good set of friends, and he’s done amazing. As a parent, the scariest thing is your kids run the gauntlet of life and they have to make all these decisions and you hope they make good ones, and you have to let ’em go. He’s made me proud at every turn.

Then, Annette and I have two kids, Hoko and Ailo. Hoko is named after a river that we really like. My last name is Finnish, and Ailo is the Scandinavian god of recreation and good times. Ailo is 7, and Hoko just turned 10. They both ski and snowboard and love it. I started skiing again, just for fun with the kids, and I love it. But I’m a snowboarder at heart. They’ve been surfing a bunch and loving the water. I’m not trying to put any pressure on them, but we’ve been fortunate. Ailo is picking up the piano and he is super-focused and obsessed, which is something he might have inherited from me—not the piano but the obsessiveness.

Hoko is a natural artist and an organizer and a thoughtful person. She’s athletic, but she’s on all kinds of creativity along with sports. Those two together through COVID became an amazing team. We have a tight little family and things have been better than I could have imagined. I know that life doesn’t always go that way. When you’re a parent, it’s your job to keep the kids alive. And it’s a scary thing to do—it’s scary to bring a kid into this world right now between the discussions of civil wars in the U.S. and the radical politics and, well, I thought everything was gonna be calmer [laughs]. But Mike and I grew up as Cold War kids and we didn’t think we were gonna live past 30. It’s scary no matter what. The love you get from your kids is mind-blowing. It’s hard to even fathom. You just gotta live in the moment.

And you guys live near the factory, near the mountains, near the ocean. You’ve got it all nearby.

We love being close to the water and that was always one of my dreams growing up. With surf, you gotta be there when it’s good. Being here is a calming thing for me. With the mountain, you can read it a bit better. My dad and I share a cabin up at Snoqualmie Pass; we go up and stay at Hyak all the time, and Hyak is my home mountain. But when I’m out on the Peninsula, you got the whole Olympic mountain range. You have to work for access there, but it’s great for splitboarding and there’s Hurricane Ridge, which is open sometimes on the weekend.

Even though it’s getting busier everywhere nowadays, there are still places to be discovered. If you’re willing to work, you can find empty surf, empty lines. As I’ve gotten older, I’m not as desperate. I enjoy the whole adventure.

These days I live 30 minutes from the Olympic mountain range. When the snow is good, it has amazing terrain. No one has the place more dialed than Temple Cummins—he has been living out here for 10 or 15 years and has explored every nook and cranny. He knows exactly when and where to go. He goes alone a lot because everyone has different schedules, and his parenting/shred windows often don’t allow anything but efficient use of time. I am down for some uphill suffering, downhill thrills and quiet time in the woods, so the past couple years he has taken me under his wing and given me a partial grand tour of his favorite spots.

We tend to stick to the forested areas, choosing tree-well hazards over big-crown avalanches. It’s steep, raw and uncontrolled, but mostly fun, choose-your-adventure, backcountry pow shredding. I am in pretty good shape, but Temp crushes me on the way up and on the way down. He is so smooth and effortless—gracefully skipping through pillows and trees, powering through turns at max speeds—that it’s hard to understand the subtleties of his snowboard mastery. Still, he is always there making sure I am all good at the bottom—other than the fact that he likes sending me off things I shouldn’t hit and quietly laughing at me when I tell him how fucked it was.

It’s like having your own personal splitboard pow guide. You always sleep well after a day of uphill skiing and downhill snowboarding.

You mentioned skiing with the kids. Mervin makes skis now, and snowboards, and surfboards… All this is just making toys that you wanna make. Do you feel like that’s made for more sustainability with the company?

If you’re a snowboard company, you’re focused on one season, and adding surf has been amazing. Surf is a year-round business. It’s added work—we’ve added categories without really adding staff, and our team’s gotten better and better at doing things as we’ve added things.

I look at a ski and a snowboard, and they’re all boards. So, we’re building boards. I grew up skiing, dreaming of working for a ski company, but then we fell in love with snowboarding. We started making skis because we wanted to take care of our buddy Tory [Bland] up at Baker, who’s a surfer as well. We called them Narrow-ass Snowboards. It’s grown slowly and attracted a few more guys like Lucas Wachs and Mike King, guys who fit in, and it’s another project and it’s another engineering challenge.

But with all these things, I just grew up dreaming of building boards, whether it was skateboards or snowboards or skis or whatever. And then we finally figured out how to do that for a job. And now that we’ve got it, I never really have thought about other jobs—I never wanted to leave. It never was a career, it just sort of happened and I think it’s great. I’ve been grateful that those doors opened for me, and I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but it did. Like with anything else, if you chase your passions, just dive into your passion, it usually doesn’t go wrong. Sometimes it can go really right.

The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4

PETE SAARI’S CREATIVE KITCHEN

Issue List

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