Back in May the Angry Snowboarder wrote an editorial called “Played Out Marketing Pitches” where he rounded on some of the snowboard companies that use pointlessly generic sales pitches such as “by riders, for riders” and “putting the fun back into snowboarding” to sell their kit. One of the things he mentioned in that article was a company called Monson which builds snowboards for a whole bunch of brands who then flog the same snowboard to the public dressed up in a different graphic and smothered in great steaming piles of marketing crap. A few months down the line and with a new season upon us we thought it would be interesting to see how each of the companies  are selling this year’s fresh crop of Monson snowboards. 

As the Angry Snowboarder says in that article, “If you’re going to run a company you seriously need to bring something to the table beyond played out pitches and cookie cutter technology, otherwise it’s just a different graphic on the same old shit”. To test out whether people were following that sage advice we tracked one particular Monson board, the ‘C6’, to see what spin each brand put on their marketing of that board and what price they gave it. We found 11 different ways you can buy the same board, epic lashings of sales diarrhoea and amazingly depending on who you buy from you could spend anything between $300 and $570 on exactly the same snowboard…

After scraping the sordid depths of the snowboarding world with last week’s smutfest we’ve gone all highbrow this week and are reviewing a book. Wear that, newly acquired and now thoroughly disappointed audience.

Normally when we review books we judge them almost solely on the cover and although this one has a nice enough cover what really drew our attention was the weight…

Fact: People absolutely love snowboarding gear guides.

It must be true. Last year our first gear guide became easily our most read article, accounting for 13% of all the visits to the site. Every day people continue to arrive in their hundreds just to enjoy that article and learn more about last year’s snowboarding gear. The only odd thing is that they don’t spend long reading the article and in under 2 minutes they’re done. 

We want to make sure we provide the quality content our readers demand so without further ado, for all you gear guide fans, here is this year’s guide…