Burton Snowboards

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message.
This article has been tagged since February 2007.

Burton Snowboards Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	1977
Headquarters	Burlington, Vermont
Key people	Jake Burton, Founder and Chairman; Laurent Potdevin, President and CEO
Industry	Sporting Goods
Products	Snowboard equipment, apparel, accessories
Revenue	$200 million USD (est.)
Employees	N/A
Website	http://www.burton.com/

Burton Snowboards, founded by Jake Burton Carpenter in 1977, is a snowboard manufacturer that has grown to become one of the leaders in its market. The company specializes in a broad product line that includes all the elements of snowboarding: hardgoods, outerwear, accessories. Aside from selling goods under its own brand name, Burton incorporates several sub-brands which focus on a specific speciality. These sub-brands include Anon Optics (snowboard goggles and eyewear), R.E.D. Protection (helmets and body armor), Analog Outerwear, and Gravis Footwear. In 2005, Four Star Distribution sold 4 of its snowboard brands to Burton, including Forum Snowboarding, Jeenyus Snowboards, Foursquare Outerwear, and Special Blend (SB) Outerwear.

Burton is often referred to as the 'Nike' of snowboarding, due to its influence within the sport and its prevalence as a global brand. Nonetheless, it must be noted that Burton is still rider-owned and independent. Due to its significant influence over the snowboard market, Burton has been courted for takeover by many large companies, yet Mr. Burton has resisted. Burton's professional snowboard team is also one of the largest and well known. Their team includes some of the most influential and successful riders in snowboarding such as Shaun White, Jeremy Jones, and Terje Haakonsen, Mason Aguirre, and Ross Powers.

[edit] Equipment

Instead of the conventional "4 hole" binding mounting system that is used on most snowboards, Burton snowboards use a proprietary 3-hole system known as the "3-D System." The 3D system has been licensed to other binding manufacturers, but as of April 2006, Burton has taken information about the licensees of the 3D System off their website.

The UnInc series of snowboards use a 2-hole mounting system called the "2X System". It consists of a slider system, where the binding is screwed into separate slides affixed to tracks. The slides can then be positioned along the track, so the rider feels comfortable. Burton modified the system to instead have fixed inserts in the snowboard, and then integrated a sliding plate into the baseplate.

Unfortunately, a common complaint with the 2-hole design is that the binding has the capability to damage (even destroy in some cases) the core and topsheet of the board due to the thin amount of core and topsheet holding the sliders in. After numerous issues and complaints from riders, Burton has replaced the sliding plate with 3 fixed positions for the 2007 UnInc lineup, and this will hopefully eradicate these problems.

Burton's higher end bindings offer a "cap strap". Unlike traditional toe straps that go over the top of the snowboard boot, the cap strap cups the toes and forces the boot down into the binding as well as back into the binding. Burton claims this design helps relieve pressure points, thus being more comfortable, to perfect the smooth ride. The cap system was initially introduced in the Winter of 2003, when Burton included the cap strap on its Mission Greed and Mission OLS binding models. After the wild success of both models, Burton decided to include the cap strap on a wider variety of binding models. As a result, Burton has slowly integrated the cap strap with the rest of their line. For the 2006/2007 season, Burton has added the capstrap to all their binding models except for the Freestyle and Freestyle Jr. models.

In addition to snowboards, Burton is also considered a pioneer in the field of outerwear design, integrating some of the most high-tech equipment into all of its product lines. The most recent of these innovations is a Bluetooth-enabled jacket (called the Audex Jacket) with built in speakers in the collar and a microphone in the chest. The system can connect to an MP3 player and cell phone and is operated via Soft Touch controls on the sleeve. This jacket was developed in partnership with Motorola.

[edit] Riders

GLOBAL

Men: Shaun White, Terje Haakonsen, Romain De Marchi, Gigi Rüf, DCP, JP Solberg, Jussi Oksanen, Jeremy Jones, Keir Dillon, Trevor Andrew, Ross Powers, Tadashi Fuse, Frederik Kalbermatten, Nicolas Müller, Heikki Sorsa, Mads Jonsson,

Women: Anne-Flore Marxer, Anne Molin Kongsgaard, Victoria Jealouse, Hannah Teter, Kelly Clark, Natasza Zurek

BURTON

Men: Mikey Rencz, Mason Aguirre, Mitch Reid, Danny Davis, Luke Mitrani, Mikkel Bang, Sani Alibabic, Iker Fernandez, Morgan Le Faucheur, Marko Grilc, Yoshinari Uemura, Kazuhiro Kokubo, Takaharu Nakai, Keegan Valaika, Wyatt Stasinos, Kevin Pearce, Dimitry Fesenko, Hannes Metzler, Stephan Maurer, Same Saarenpåå, Christian Haller
Women: Molly Aguirre, Elena Hight, Junko Asazuma, Spencer O'Brien

NATIONALS

Men: Charles Gagnon, Yale Cousino, Chris Rotax, Madison Elsworth, Charles Reid
Women: Gabi Viteri, Ellery Hollingsworth, Julia Baumgartner

Burton also sponsors "Smalls" riders - the up and coming generation of shredders.