JAMIE LYNN AND THE BEST RUN EVER 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 rec-reational trip, you can’t really scope a run. You have to be conserva-tive, so you don’t end up flying off a cliff or into a crevasse — you usu-ally 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 sepa-rated 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 end-less 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. Then, for the longest time, we ran our business without any interfer-ence 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 snow-boarding. 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 pro-vides 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. There’s no such thing as one-design-element-fits-all in snowboarding. 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. Do you feel like Quiksilver helped you grow without requiring you to change? 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 prof-itable. 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. PETE SAARI 081
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4: Page 81
