SEQUIM -- Pick up any snowboard and odds are it was made overseas, which means board designers are typically far removed from production.
That's not the case at Mervin Manufacturing, a factory in Sequim where the minds behind the GNU and Lib Tech brands of snowboards walk just a few paces to the assembly line instead of emailing their ideas thousands of miles away. This 40-year-old brainchild of a Burien kid turned snowboarding pioneer is a rare domestic manufacturing success story and innovator for its environmental practices that continue to push the boundaries of board sports.
With 23% of U.S. market share for boards priced above $500 according to Snowsports Industries America figures, Mervin Manufacturing's wares are no bespoke product at what amounts to North America's largest snowboard factory. You can buy them off the shelf at evo, REI and Sturtevants. Pay attention in the lift lines this season and you'll see the bright yellow Skate Banana, black-and-white T.Rice Orca and Mervin-made Roxy snowboards holding their own among the snowboarders rocking Burton and Jones underfoot.
Granted, Mervin can't compete on price alone with the lower labor cost of overseas manufacturing. Salomon's entry-level made-in-China Pulse snowboard runs $370, for example, while a made-in-Sequim Skate Banana goes for $580. Today both Lib Tech and GNU are higher-end performance boards for seasoned riders looking to up their game. In addition to designing boards for world-famous professional snowboarders like Travis Rice and Jamie Lynn, Mervin-made boards led Jamie Anderson and Kaitlyn Farrington to Team USA gold medals in slopestyle and halfpipe, respectively, at the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Yet despite hanging with the snow sports industry heavyweights, Mervin's culture hasn't strayed significantly from its earliest days when Mike Olson, 60, made his first snowboard at Burien's Sylvester Junior High School in December 1978. A passionate skateboarder and skier who combined those two hobbies in shop class, he later joined forces with surf buddy Pete Saari, 60, and they turned their shared passion into a career. To this day, Mervin's commitment to made-in-Washington stems from the sheer satisfaction the team derives from making boards on its own terms.
"We're in love with snowboards and surfboards," said Saari. "What keeps Mike, myself and a lot of our people engaged in our company is just that excitement of building a new board."
Surf and snow
On a clear winter day the Olympic Mountains' snow-capped peaks are visible on the way to Mervin Manufacturing, which occupies over 60,000 square feet in a Sequim industrial park. The company has operated out of this complex since 1995, but easy access to the snow isn't the primary attraction. The peninsula's lone ski area, Hurricane Ridge, only operates on weekends.
Instead, it's the small town's proximity to waves on the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Pacific Coast that lured Olson and Saari from Seattle, where they initially ran Mervin Manufacturing's operations, making snowboards and skateboards until 2005.
Olson made his first snowboard inspired by a photo of a Sims Ski Board, a skateboard deck affixed to a surfboard. In 1984, he dropped out of Pacific Lutheran University to pursue boardmaking full time and launched the GNU brand. By then he had added surfboards to his repertoire and even took on sailboards, latching onto the Columbia River Gorge windsurfing craze. Anything to keep the boardmaking dream afloat.
A mutual friend named Mervin (hence the company name) introduced Olson to Saari in 1985 while surfing on the Washington coast, back when the Pacific Northwest surf scene included only a handful of die-hards willing to brave the cold water. (Today with the advent of warmer wet suits, cold water surfing is considerably more popular.) Like Olson, Saari was also a skier -- they both taught at The Summit at Snoqualmie -- though a reluctant snowboarder. But while other friends bailed on the snowboarding business, convinced it would never take off, Saari took the leap and joined him.
While production fluctuates yearly depending on consumer demand, Mervin Manufacturing makes around 100,000 units annually including surfboards, wakeboards and snowskates (like a skateboard on snow). Snowboards represent the lion's share, accounting for 80% of Mervin Manufacturing's global sales. But for Olson and Saari, the swell and the snow are two sides of the same coin.
"When you're surfing, you might be thinking about snowboards, and when you're on the chairlift, you might be thinking about the next surfboard you're building," Saari said.
For those with an all-season passion for board sports, Washington is one of the few places in the world that offers reasonable proximity to both snow and surf. Mervin operates a four-day workweek and the Sequim complex typically clears out on winter weekends as many of its 120 employees head to their preferred Cascade ski areas. From Mount Baker to Mount Hood and everywhere in between, Mervin employees are plugged into the Pacific Northwest snowboard scene, while sponsored riders show off Lib Tech and GNU boards around the world.
Collectively, feedback on board design and style observations from ski towns filter back to Sequim -- making this quiet retirement haven an unlikely but significant outpost of snowboard culture far from the other two North American hubs of snowboard manufacturing in Denver and eastern Québec.
"We're able to stay current and engaged these days between social media, our employees and our pro riders," Saari said. "And we're able to stay relevant because we're so passionate. We're such nerds about snowboard, ski, surf and skate culture that we've become our own hub."
The art of staying in business
During snowboarding's early days in the 1980s, Olson had a knack for innovation. He tinkered with surfboardlike fins and adapted shapes from ski design along the board's sides, tip and tail. But snowboard design prowess did not necessarily translate to business savvy in a cutthroat emerging market. In the late 1980s, an unscrupulous distributor welched on payments, started a rival brand and nearly deep-sixed the duo's dream.
After years of legal wrangling, they righted the ship and launched the Lib Tech brand in time for the 1990s snowboarding boom. In 1996, Mervin made over 70,000 snowboards and grossed $15.2 million. With hundreds of upstart brands competing for customers' attention, Olson and Saari realized the bubble was about to burst and sought an investor to stabilize their bootstrapped company. In 1997, surfing-oriented clothing brand Quiksilver bought Mervin for $4.4 million, including its $3 million in bank debt. (Quiksilver owns women's brand Roxy, which is how Mervin ended up making their snowboards.) Quiksilver eventually sold Mervin to Bay Area private equity firm Altamont Capital Partners in 2013 for an undisclosed sum.
The company took another step toward long-term stability in 2015 when Mervin hired former K2 Sports CEO Anthony De Rocco. He brought business insights like measuring how many hours go into manufacturing each board that allow the funky board shop to compete in a ruthless global marketplace.
"It was very seat of the pants," said De Rocco via phone. "I brought practices into play that they hadn't utilized, like looking at market data, attacking price points, bringing new products to market and investing in the manufacturing side."
While private equity and ski industry CEOs sound like a far cry from a quirky independent snowboard maker, Olson and Saari insisted that as long as revenues stay steady, Mervin retains its creative freedom -- along with not having to explain the snowboard business to skeptical loan officers.
"It's a much healthier situation for us right now than it was when we owned it outright," Saari said. "And the truth is we didn't own it, the bank owned it. We got loans. We were kids with no money when we started building boards."
Today, the team at the helm of Mervin are no novices. Olson and Saari are backed by winter sports industry veterans with decades of experience, who together are custodians of one of the last-of-its-kind companies in the U.S. At its peak, the factory can crank out 1,000 snowboards in a day.
Environmental ethos
As Olson and Saari look to Mervin's future, they see opportunities to improve on a legacy of green manufacturing practices. Building boards can be toxic -- from solvents to polyester resins, the raw materials often consist of potentially hazardous chemicals.
Inspired by environmentally conscious California outdoors brand Patagonia and raised in the shadow of events like the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, Olson and Saari sought to do better from the get-go.
At Mervin, a cleaner board starts with a wood core of aspen or paulownia, what Saari calls "nature's fiberglass," which is encased in epoxy resin. Respirators are optional for Mervin's board builders, who work with resins and hardeners that emit less indoor air-fouling pollutants than typical industry materials, though these safer alternatives cure faster so they require the crew to work more quickly on each board.
Finally comes the topsheet -- the eye-catching graphic decals that help a board stand out on a sales rack or in a lift line -- another traditionally dirty process accomplished by printing designs with epoxy inks. Instead, Mervin uses water-based inks, and developed a proprietary process that allows them to print directly onto the board at a low enough temperature to avoid warping the board's smooth finish.
The sawdust that coats the factory floor is trucked outside to a compost pile. Saari proudly noted that Mervin has never paid for a hazardous waste haul-away service, and aspires to achieve zero landfill in the next decade.
That commitment has made them a beacon in the snowboarding industry. This week alone, Olson hosted a visiting Japanese couple who handcraft snowboards, entertained pitches from sales reps offering new fiberglass composites and met with Finnish power tool company Mirka about an abrasive finishing tool to reduce dust. In between, he sneaked in some time to work on his latest pet project, a manually powered hydrofoil known as a pump foil.
"We're doing R&D every day to come up with new ideas and new products," said Olson. "We like building these toys because we want to ride them."