In addition to its relationship with Icelantic, Never Summer manufactures skis for Colorado companies Fat-ypus (Breckenridge), High Society Freeride (Snowmass), Rocky Mountain Underground (Dillon) and Enabling Technologies, a Denver company specializing in adaptive ski equipment for the disabled. Never Summer now also manufactures Hart Skis, a Minnesota company that was one of the first to pioneer metal-edge technology on skis, going head-to-head with Head Skis for industry dominance in the 1960s and '70s.
The Canadays also make Never Summer-branded snowboards with custom graphics for some of the specialty shops they work with, as well as promotional boards for clients ranging from Molson/Coors and Monster Energy to the U.S. Army. They launched a successful line of Never Summer longboard skateboards in 2007, allowing them to build on their existing distribution network, add accounts in new markets and open up a sideline summer sales season. The week before the SIA trade show, Never Summer sent representatives to the Surf Expo in Orlando, SIA's summer sports equivalent, to show off its 2010-2011 skateboards.
Tony Gallagher
Jose Doton works on boards for the 2011 line at Never Summer's north Denver factory.
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"We'll have to change the name to Never Sleep at this rate," Tracey jokes. "But those manufacturing partnerships and new Never Summer businesses have opened up new avenues for us, and they've allowed us to grow our snowboarding business in a way that makes sense without getting ahead of ourselves. You can almost count the number of U.S. factories doing good skis and snowboards on one hand, but a lot of companies are now wanting to come back and claim that U.S. manufacturing presence, and we've been able to capitalize on that and play to our strength as a manufacturer."
Mervin Manufacturing — makers of Gnu, Lib Tech and Roxy snowboards, and one of Never Summer's closest competitors — still operates its factory out of Carlsborg, Washington, and Signal Snowboards has a factory in Vista, California. Burton Snowboards still makes some of its boards in Vermont, but has mostly sent its operations overseas. With a handful of smaller exceptions, the rest of the snowboarding industry has exported itself to China.
Tim and Tracey see delicious irony in their own story: When they established what they hoped would be able to stay a made-in-Colorado snowboard company, their first major order came from a Japanese distributor. In Tim's telling, their first overseas deliveries sailed by their competitors' boxes coming in the opposite direction, on ships passing in the night.
"We ran our first full-page ad in Snowboarder magazine, and a few weeks later we get a fax from this guy, Fumito Nagahara, from Agate Corporation," Tim recalls. "Snowboarding was just blowing up in Japan, and all these guys over there wanted to be able to say they were the exclusive Japanese distributor for an American company. The 'Made in the U.S.A.' thing was very important to them, and so he wanted to come over and check out our facility. Well, our facility was a garage in Summit County at that point, no bigger than this office. We had one hydraulic press and a bunch of hand tools to show for ourselves. But we laid it all out, set up some prototype boards and put our game faces on. He comes over with a whole entourage, like four or five guys from his corporation, and two days later we'd penciled an agreement to do 650 units. He wired us something like 60 or 70 Gs to get started. It might has well have been $70 million, it was so big for us at that time. We'd done about twenty boards the year before, and that deal gave us the capital to buy the base grinders and basic equipment we needed to get to the next level. We did 3,000 units the year after that, and all of a sudden we've got a couple hundred thousand dollars. We found ourselves approaching Colorado shops saying, 'You've never heard of us, but we're big in Japan!'"
Never Summer considers the few companies that still manufacture snowboards in Colorado friends rather than competitors. Unity Snowboards, a small company in Dillon, sponsors Breckenridge team riders Zach Black and JJ Thomas, halfpipe competitors who have been holding their own on the U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix as Olympic hopefuls and have helped the company raise its profile. Venture, another tiny company, specializes in big mountain boards and split boards ideal for the backcountry terrain at its local mountain in Silverton; it does small production runs popular in Colorado shops. But nobody flies the Colorado flag as proudly as Never Summer: The graphic for its 2010-2011 Heritage board is an American eagle carrying a Colorado flag; every board that leaves the factory boasts a three-year warranty sticker with a Colorado flag logo; and every mention of the Never Summer name in any of the company's marketing materials is paired with "Made in U.S.A., NS Factory Built, Denver, CO."
"This is a great market to be in, and we do probably 20 percent of our business right here in Colorado," Tracey says. "I love seeing new local companies coming up, and it's easy to grow when you're small; we've grown every year since we've been in business. But you see how many companies come and go. My brother and I, we're pretty frugal guys, and we want this to be a super-long-term deal, for Never Summer and for the entire industry, so I'm less concerned about competition from other snowboard companies than I am about the specialty shops themselves. What keeps me up at night is wondering how some of these shops are going to make it. It's just brutal out there for these retail shops. I'm hoping that they can survive, and I think companies like us can help protect them."
