Burton Has Shaped Snowboarding for 50 Years. Who Shapes the Next 50?

Burton has divided snowboarding's first 50 years into five chapters and given each one a name: Sideways Revolution, Listen to the Riders, All the Way Up, No Permission Needed. The fifth covers 2018 to 2027. It arrives last, in February, and it is called The Future Is Unknown. Each chapter comes as a short documentary episode, a product drop and a run of events, released one at a time. The first went live on September 10 with a reissue of the 1985 Powder Shell, snowboarding's first outerwear, rebuilt in modern three-layer fabric. The campaign line is "50 Years of Burton. 50 Years of Snowboarding." Burton can make that claim more easily than most brands: few have a history that is so nearly the same thing as their sport's.

The first chapter is told the way a family tells its own story. The era-one timeline is a scrapbook. It shows the prototypes built in a Londonderry, Vermont barn, more than a hundred before the Backhill. It covers the Manchester years, when "the barn is the factory, the living room the store, and the basement the warehouse." It includes the statistic that fewer than 5% of resorts allowed snowboarding in 1985 and 95% did by 1996. Several of the photographs are credited "Unknown." The episode runs on Burton's own channel, narrated by Donna Carpenter, Burton's owner and chair.

That choice shapes what the series can be. A brand telling its own history tends toward something affectionate and complete: the obstacles are external, the resorts and the doubters, and the ending is already known. An outside storyteller brings a point of view the brand doesn't control, and that friction is usually where a history gets interesting. Burton has told its story that way before. Dear Rider, the 2021 HBO documentary about Jake Burton Carpenter, was directed by Fernando Villena and produced by Red Bull Media House. The 50th series takes on a larger subject, the whole sport, and tells it from inside the house. The riders are the subject, and the brand holds the pen.

The brand that kept deciding what came next

Burton's record is mostly a record of deciding what riders would do next. In 1994 it made the Ouija, the first mass-produced true twin. In 1996 it released Shannon Dunn's pro model, billed as the first pro board designed by a woman. In 2007 it changed how bindings mount with the Channel. Burton's own archive traces Step On, the strapless binding system it launched in 2017, to a rear-entry binding that Scott Keller, now its hardgoods design engineering manager, built as his college senior project in 1993. "It didn't really work very well," Keller has said, "but it did allow me to graduate." Burton's first strapless system, Step In, shipped in 1999, and Keller says it left "lots of areas to improve on." The company spent nearly two decades on a future it couldn't yet get right.

The 50th's forward-looking material takes a different form: principles rather than products. The anthem film closes on "50 years got us here. What's next is wide open." Carpenter recalls that "Jake was often asked to predict snowboarding's future, and he always said it was up to the riders." The fifth era's only line so far reads: "The best version of snowboarding hasn't been built yet." That is humility, and it is Jake's own. For a company whose founding ethos was listening to riders, handing them the future is consistent.

It also leaves the rider to supply the picture. Brands earn their next generation by showing where they are going clearly enough that someone can say that future is for people like them, and want in. A history told in Burton's voice explains why Burton matters. It does less to make a new rider want a part of what comes next, because the most specific thing it says about the future is that nobody knows what it holds. TBR asked a version of this question about Rapha last month: can an archive tell people what a brand thinks now? Burton's case is sharper, because so much of its archive is a record of inventing what came next.

The fifth chapter also has a new author. Denny Bruce became chief executive on September 21, eleven days after the series began. He succeeds Carpenter, who had run the company on an interim basis since June and remains chair. Bruce started at Burton as a brand manager in 2003. He has since held senior roles at Vans, Skullcandy and Traeger, and run Dickies and Gozney. The era Burton's own campaign calls unknown is the one he now runs.

The Future Is Unknown lands in February. It is the only chapter in the series that doesn't have to look back, and the one place a 50-year story can say what Burton thinks snowboarding should become and who it is for. The anniversary leaves one question standing: will Burton use that chapter to draw the picture, or hand the pen back to the riders, the way Jake always did?