After 30 years pressing boards, the humble, hardworking Never Summer family is managing a global brand from their home in Denver, Colorado.
Growing up, flipping through snowboarding mags in the early ’90s, there was this one ad that really stuck out to me, which remains so memorable to this day. It was a full-page photo of this dude bending the absolute shit out of a snowboard to illustrate how well-made this particular board was. At the time (1994), snowboarding was in its absolute heyday. If memory serves me correctly, the 1993 TransWorld Snowboarding buyer’s guide featured roughly 20 brands. 1994’s issue was overflowing with, like, a million (again, a rough estimate). Snowboarding had hit the big time, and of course everyone wanted in. This three-year-old company out of Denver, Colorado, named after the state’s Never Summer Range high up in the neighboring Rocky Mountains, was busy getting its brand out there, and this ad gripped me.
Started by brothers Tim and Tracey Canaday, Never Summer has always been a boutique snowboard brand. Tim, the master shaper, toils over measurements, radii, newtons, and durometers. Tracey, on the other hand, drives the exposure, constantly hustling to spread the good word and wholesome vibe that is Never Summer, whether it’s through an extensive 200-stop grassroots U.S. demo tour or by partnering up with some of snowboarding’s most passionate pro shredders.
The brand was born out of the brothers’ two big passions: snowboarding and bow hunting. While that may seem like an odd pairing, a laminated recurve bow (their tool of choice) and a snowboard share more similarities than you might think (metal edges aside, of course). Made of built-up laminations of wood and fiberglass bonded by special flexible epoxy resins, archery bows and snowboards are all about storing and releasing energy, and the camber (bending) of each determines its particular performance. Never Summer’s new Recurve Traditional Camber is just that: a snowboard with a recurve-bow profile, a shape that has been used for centuries and is widely known for its efficient energy storage and explosive energy release.
The Canaday boys pressed their first snowboards in 1983, under the moniker Swift Snowboards. (That first brand’s logo is still used to denote Tim’s personal quiver of Never Summer board shapes, the Shaper Series.) A few years later, after separately moving to California, they attended an early on-snow demo and trade show at Bear Mountain together to try to connect with fellow early-day snowboard builders, but the brothers weren’t digging the collective vibe of the other brands. They vowed to create a niche in this sport they’d come to love, but, in doing so, they wanted to present themselves as a more inclusive brand, and one that could make boards with the best of ’em.
In 1991, Never Summer was born. It went to market with 300 boards—total.
Regardless of size and era, the Never Summer crew has always been a tight-knit team, comprising several specialists in their individual crafts. The woodworkers seek out the best sections of hand-selected wood staves and meticulously assemble each lamination to form the heart of every board. From there, each snowboard in the making embarks on a factory-wide journey across a series of workbenches, receiving further attention from other craftspeople. Together, this brigade produces in the neighborhood of 30,000 snowboards per year.
By having their hands directly on every aspect of producing a snowboard, the factory staff is able to pivot when they need to, change trends in snowboarding, when an unforeseen order comes in, or to create cool small-batch projects, like their annual board-and-beer collaboration with local Breckenridge Brewery.
Three decades after producing its first small run of boards, the factory now runs year-round, with each and every board personally cared for, every step of the way. You can take a tour and talk to the people who made your snowboard, and there are several in the crew who have been with Never Summer since the 1990s. There’s a lot of comfort in knowing that. There’s the edge guy, who diligently bends each edge to the shape of its specific board and assures a perfect fit. There’s the core-prep team, which maps out the carbon-fiber configuration of each board. There’s the band-saw dude, who meticulously trims each and every snowboard to its final shape after it comes off of the press. The list of craftsmen goes on, totaling 60 in all.
And you can’t dive into the crew without mentioning Chairman of the Boards Vince Sanders. Vince embodies everything Never Summer, Colorado and snowboarding, all at once. A true man-grom, Vince eats, sleeps and breathes this stuff. Then there’s Jeremy Salyer, the creative director, who has been designing the line’s graphics for more than 20 seasons. His office is straight across the hallway from Chris Harris, Never Summer’s marketing director of the past 15 years. Chris is assisted by Jess Tennyson, the marketing manager and women’s team manager, who has been a staple in snowboarding’s graphic-design orbit and has plenty of experience in team management. Jess and marketing specialist/web developer Matt Williams make a powerhouse team in social media strategy and marketing. Together with Mike Gagliardi, the company’s snow sales manager, strategies are formed, orders are booked, boards are pressed and shipped and the team pushes ahead. As for Tim and Tracey, they’re still as hands-on as ever, punching the clock every day and immersing themselves in everything Never Summer has on the horizon.
This is still just a small fraction of the Never Summer family, all of whom are in it for the love and for the pride in what they produce. The brand has the factory right in-house and can monitor and manage every single aspect of production and quality control, including repairing customers’ boards to keep them out of landfills and on the snow—something nearly impossible to do when manufacturing handmade products on the other side of the world. It’s why Never Summer stands behind their boards with a three-year warranty.
Speaking of the other side of the world, while on a visit to the factory this spring, I saw van-sized crates lined up at Never Summer’s loading dock, filled with thousands of boards awaiting pickup for distribution throughout the southern hemisphere. It was a testament to the idea that working hard, taking pride in how snowboards are made and being humble along the way will result in a quality product that won’t go unnoticed.
Along their 33-year history, the Never Summer family has adapted and invented various manufacturing processes, materials and toolings: custom-fabricated epoxy-resin mixers, tools that force-wet fiberglass matting to ensure absolute adhesion and less waste, even custom-formed presses, which use a pneumatic process to guarantee (you guessed it) absolute adhesion. Every cog in the process is fueled by the pride of knowing that each snowboard is as well-made as humanly possible.
Thinking back to that ad in 1994, maybe this has been the mission all along.
