Take a look at the boards in your local shop and you can pick out the Arbors. Since the brand’s beginning, their boards have maintained a classic look and feel: clean lines, considered shapes, and the natural patterns of woodgrain that make up their real wood topsheets. Those topsheets are called Arbor Powerply, and it’s not just the aesthetics that make them so special. For twenty-five years, Arbor has been building snowboards with Powerply, collaborating over this time with three generations of the Bohlke family, who own and operated the M. Bohlke Veneer Corp in Ohio. For Arbor, the sourcing and creating of Powerply is integral to building snowboards–not only in how they can contribute positively to the environment through the process, but also because using a natural fiber for their boards’ topsheets has plenty of performance benefits. Powerply works like an added layer of fiberglass, improving the strength, durability, and return of the snowboard while relying less on man-made glues, coatings, and composites for construction.

In Real Wood, meet Nick Bohlke, a snowboarder, himself, who runs M. Bohlke Veneer, and watch how Powerply is made. (Spoiler alert: Enormous logs are sliced into really thin sheets using only water and electricity.)