You mentioned skiing with the kids. Mervin makes skis now, and snow-boards, 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 com-pany, 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 ex-actly 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. PETE SAARI 087
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4: Page 87
