As Rome Snowboards celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we traveled to 1 Derby Lane, the brand’s headquarters in Northern Vermont. The red building is humble and iconically New England on the outside, but on the inside, ideas, concepts, products, movies, and more have been catalyzed, created, and applied to snowboarding for two decades, shaking up the status quo due to the unwavering passion and dedicated of the crew who calls the office homebase.
For Rome Snowboards, embedded in the past twenty years is an unwavering ideology that is rooted so much in where the office sits. “This humble building is the spiritual home of the brand, as it embodies what we stand for: Riding is paramount, above all else,” says Matt Stillman, Rome marketing and team manager. “We’re just outside of Burlington, between three major resorts, Stowe, Sugarbush, and Bolton Valley. All winter long, snowboarding is priority number one.” The location allows the crew to ride every day before work and some days after. “This enables us to create the best product that we can,” explains Stillman, “based on the simple notion of the design loop: conceive it, build it, ride it, test it, tweak it, and repeat accordingly.”
There are places in snowboarding that we make pilgrimages to because of their role in this culture, whether resort, spot, city, or mountain range, and the house that Rome built, its nucleus in Waterbury, Vermont, is on that list.
Video by Lucky Lopez.