Snowboard king Jake Burton Carpenter passed away on November 20. Forbes spoke to him in October, for what turned out to be his final interview with a U.S. publication by ElisabethAnne15
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Plus he knew the business was in great hands. His wife, Donna, who had built Burton alongside him for 37 years, took the CEO reins in 2016. John Lacy, who has worked for Burton for 22 years, became co-CEO last year to help her, after having stepped up when Jake was sick. visit, he announced to his staff that the cancer was back. “It’s the same tumor as the first time around. We just never got rid of it all. A bit of it hung out in my lymph nodes and got back into business,” said Carpenter.
Indeed. By developing a snowboard that had the same edge control as a ski, working with resorts to demonstrate the equipment’s safety, setting up global distribution channels and launching the Burton U.S. Open , Carpenter successfully catapulted snowboarding from a niche hobby to a globally recognized sport.
He hired two friends and a relative, and they began making 50 boards a day as planned, spending nearly all of the inheritance left by his grandma. He named the brand Burton, which was his middle name. But sales were disappointingly slow. “We sold only 300 that first year,” Carpenter lamented. “We had three years’ worth of snowboards before I hit the brakes and said we got to stop. Money is going out and it’s not coming in.” His three employees were let go.
“We were good at different things,” says Donna Carpenter about her successful partnership with her late husband, Jake.Soon she was traveling to Vermont on weekends to visit Carpenter and working as an unofficial Burton employee. Putting on hazmat suits with air compression, they would go outside, take pieces of laminated wood and hand dip them into polyurethane to make snowboards. “These were some of our first dates,” recounts Donna Carpenter with a laugh. They married in 1983.
In order to be welcomed on mountains, Carpenter decided to make his snowboards more like skis. During a trip to Austria with Donna and her family, the newly married couple went from ski factory to ski factory trying to get someone to agree to build this new design.
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