Thursday, September 29, 2011

With the gear guides and snowboard review season in full swing and people contemplating their next snowboard purchase its the time of year we hear a lot of blag from a plethora of snowboard companies about why their company is better than everyone else's, as they try to make their products stand out in a busy marketplace. To try and make sense of some of these claims we wanted to find a way to display the background of the different companies so that we could really see how they all compare.


We've spent the last few days researching the company histories of the major snowboard makers and putting it all into a pretty infographic. From the chart you can see how old the companies are, how long they've been making snowboards, which companies are independent and which are owned or licensed by other companies. Some of the things we found surprised us...

Thursday, September 22, 2011


Jonathan Beilke is a web developer for Active Sports Inc, the people who run The House and TruSnow snowboard webstores. In his spare time Jon steals the content from this blog and uses it to run a muggy little affiliate website. We contacted Jon two weeks ago asking him nicely to remove our content from his site, but so far there’s been no reply and no change. Assuming he just doesn’t read his emails we figured the best way to get Jon’s attention would be to write an article about him and his shady side business and make sure it appears in the one place we’re sure he’ll notice - all over his own site…

Monday, September 12, 2011


Shaun White rakes in about $9million a year for this snowboarding lark according to Forbes magazine. A top snowboard pro like White can earn about $100,000 a year in prize money and that makes up just over 1% of the the pot, the other 99% comes from sponsorships. To put things into context, Shaun White earned more money in 2008 from endorsements than every single baseball player and every American football player except for Payton Manning.

Shaun White appeals to a type of audience that is not normally interested in snowboarding and because of that he is attractive to companies from outside snowboarding looking to appeal to that wider audience. You can see that reflected in a list of his major sponsors, it's an eclectic mix that no other snowboarder comes close to matching; Burton, Target, BF Goodrich, Oakley, Ubisoft, Vail Resorts, Red Bull and Hewlett Packard.

In a similar way that Shaun White appeals to people and advertisers outside of the sport, snowboarding itself has that ability. Ever since snowboarding started to push its way into popular culture advertisers with nothing do with the sport have been keen to jump on the bandwagon. Today we take a look at some of the most interesting TV commercials that have come out of this uneasy relationship...


Thursday, September 1, 2011

Earlier in the month a drunken member of the US skiing team was dropped from the team after he pissed on a 12-year-old girl during an overnight flight - a story covered by the New York Post in an article titled “Urine Big Trouble!”. 18-year-old Robert Vietze was also hit with a federal indecent-exposure charge and could face a year in prison and a $1,000 fine if he is convicted. 
In strangely coincidental news just one week later the actor Gerard Depardieu also found himself in trouble after relieving himself on a plane in France. 
This got us thinking; what kind of legal trouble have snowboarders got themselves into over the years? This week we’ve lined-up a veritable rogue’s gallery of snowboarding miscreants who have run afoul of the law for a range of criminal misdeeds…
 
© 1896. Design by Main-Blogger - Tinkering by Zhang - Colouring in by Illicit