Here is a surefire way to build a snowboarding company: Find a marquee name in the snowboarding world, someone who can spin airborne like a dervish off a jump and land upright. Someone who could win a gold medal at the next Winter Olympics, if some truly adventurous coach can cleanse their blood of THC. Or maybe you’re the snowboarding champ, and you wake up realizing that this whole sport is high on fun but chronically low on paydays.

Step One: Take this madman of the slopes, and attach his name to a board and a line of products. The core snowboarders—the ones who drive into the mountains on Friday right after work, every weekend from October through March, and come back on Sunday red from sun and snow—might turn their noses at your boards, but the masses will buy. If EA Games rings, take the call.


Step Two: Profit.
Step Three: Take that money and dump it in an offshore account, because fads like these tend to burn out in one year, maybe two. Then either you or your meal ticket is back to being mostly broke, charming the ski bunnies with some quadruple somersault on the black-diamond slopes.

But this is not how Dave Tran, 31, wants his business to work. The founder of local company Monument Snowboards is in it for the long haul, he says. “I’m taking it slow, as opposed to shoving things down people’s throats. It’s about having a good-quality product, keeping the brand clean, free of a bad reputation.”
And having fun, besides.

Startup
Not many businesses start with a missing bag, but not many missing bags contain $2,500 worth of snowboarding equipment: two boards, a pair of bindings, two jackets and a pair of pants, fleece, goggles, snowboard boots and board bag. That’s exactly what happened to Tran on his way to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, when his bag of gear walked away at Dulles. After a week of renting snowboard equipment, he decided to start selling it online. This was February 1999.

Through the Capitol Board Room site (the name originally belonged to a West Coast-styled snowboard/skateboard/surf shop in Fairfax, now closed, whose Web site he designed) Tran started selling World Industries and Lamar snowboards, Technine snowboard bindings, Planet Earth clothing, and Spy Goggles. In 2001, he decided to start selling his own equipment, and thus Monument Snowboards was born.

Tran contacted factories, to make the boards. He built contacts with local snowboarders, eventually assembling a team that included Jeremy Cline, an accomplished rider (who happens to be deaf) at the Massanutten Resort in Virginia who had become famous among the mid-Atlantic snowboard community. From small beginnings, he focused on growing slowly.

Compared to the Rockies, slopes along the East Coast tend to be flat as Ronald Reagan’s EKG line, but Tran thinks of the location as something of an advantage. “There’s no snowboarding companies around here, and a lot of good riders—from Pennsylvania and all over—to capitalize on,” he says. “And if you can make it big here, you can make it big later on out West or wherever.”

Two shops, in Baltimore and Harrisonburg, carry his stuff; in another few weeks, he says, 10 more will join the list. Stores in general want to sell boards backed by the most advertising, saving them a lot of the grunt work of moving product—but that sometimes makes it difficult for smaller labels to put their boards on the shelves. Fortunately, there’s the Internet, where Tran sells the majority of his boards for now.

Business
It’s only been a couple of decades since some enterprising dude with evidently not enough excitement in his life decided to strap both feet to a board and send himself careening downhill fast enough to break speed laws, and the business of selling snowboards reflects that, to an extent. That’s to say, there’s a fair bit of feudalism, or anarchy, or Darwinism, or whatever term you wish to describe a bunch of people fighting for relatively limited territory. The fact that there are only a limited number of mountains helps segment the business further.

The big boys
Technine owns Utah and New York. Burton Snowboards owns 40 percent of the market, period. It’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room, metaphorically speaking. Oh yeah, it also dominates Vermont snowboarding.

On top of all that, it’s a medium-margin business, if you’re lucky.

Anyone who wants to start singing the chorus of, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” feel free.

Tran deals with this any way he can, namely working constantly, making contacts, and sleeping roughly three hours a night. The company just finished its video, CloudsHappen, a 26-minute team film of spills and runs set to thrashing guitars, featuring all the members of the Monument Snowboards team (it’s up on their Web site, monumentsnowboards.com). The team itself needs to be managed, its members sent off to, say, Snowboarder Magazine’s ‘Super Park’ event. And then comes the boards themselves—Tran designs one or two a year, with team members coming up with the others; curator of the 2007-08 line is Chris Glancy, a NYC/L.A. fashion photographer.

Widescreen laptop in hand, he handles the marketing, branding, video editing, and managing duties. “I don’t care about being out front,” he says. “I’d rather be the guy in the background, running everything.”

The only thing governing the snowboard industry is its fickleness; what’s big one year could be totally out of favor the next. Despite such a Wild West environment, Monument Snowboards has managed to become a full-fledged brand, one Tran describes as “small compared to everyone else” but poised (he hopes) on the verge of bigger and better things.

Indeed, in January he plans to take the brand to the Snowsports Industry Association tradeshow in Las Vegas. “I started this company because I wanted to bring back what snowboarding was for me 10 years ago,” he says. “Not wearing the latest fashion or talking shit to kids. It’s about having fun.”