History Burton

When we talk about the history of the Burton brand, we are practically talking about the history of snowboarding in general. Although Jake Burton - the founder of the Burton company - is not the author of the very idea of ??the snowboard, it was he who turned a simple children's toy Snurfer into a snowboard, and it was he who created snowboarding as a sport and a way of life, which a large number of people in the world live today .

In the mid-60s, Jake was one of the kids who got carried away with Sherman Poppen's Snurfer toy; in fact, it was just a small piece of plastic on which children rolled from small hills to their homes. Having grown up, Jake set out to improve this toy for more serious skating. In the mid-70s, Jake moved to Londonderry (Vermont) and began to create and test new versions of snowboards. Thus, in 1977, the world's first factory for the production of snowboards - Burton Snowboards - was founded (Jake was 23 at the time).

A year later, the Burton Snowboards company (then consisting of 4-5 employees - friends and relatives of Jake) moved to a small country house in Manchester (Vermont), which became the headquarters of the company. In the living room there was production, in the dining room - repairs, and in Jake's bedroom - the department for receiving orders, which were accepted even in the middle of the night. The now classic models of Burton Backhill and Performer snowboards were born here. Jake created another snowboard model, loaded them into his old truck and went to stores offering to buy a new product. In addition, Burton Snowboards organized unique snowboard tours: they gathered groups to climb local mountains to ride - after all, at that time snowboarding was not yet recognized as a sport, and snowboarders were not allowed in ski resorts. For a few more years, snowboarding remained an underground sport, but Jake understood that the situation needed to be changed. He tried his best to negotiate with local ski resorts so that snowboarders would also be allowed to ride their lifts. And in 1982, the Suicide Six resort in Vermont became the first resort in the world to open its doors to snowboarders; soon after that, Jake managed to persuade Stratton Mountain to follow suit, and other resorts soon followed.Snowboarding has become a sport. The opening of resorts for snowboarders started a new era of snowboarding.Riding on hard prepared tracks required new technical improvements. This is how the first model, the progenitor of modern boards, appeared - the Performer Elite - the first snowboard with iron edges, a P-tex slide and mounts with spoilers.

Today, the Burton company, based in Burlington (Vermont, USA) is the world's largest snowboard company with a multibillion-dollar turnover and a huge workforce around the world. But just like 30 years ago, when the bodywork was done in Jake's garage, the main goal of the company remains to create the most advanced snowboarding equipment. Not only Burton developers are working on this task, but also the riders themselves, who are directly involved in the creation of new snowboard equipment. Perhaps that is why the Burton company has always been and remains the standard of unsurpassed quality in the snowboarding world.