Plant size and recruiting limitations led to the company's transplanting to Burlington, Vermont in 1992. Jake now commutes 45 minutes each way from his home near the mother of all American ski resort towns, Stowe. The sport Jake helped to found is now the only sector of the ski industry that's showing any real growth energy. Trade organizations such as Ski Industries America, who were at first wary of the upstarts, now sing their praises. Jake is Mr. Snowboard.
Snowboard professes to be a bit surprised at the direction the sport has gone.
I didn't see it coming, but it turned out that the first big group to take up snowboarding were kids who were the age I was when I first got a Snurfer. That big tide of youth has helped contribute to the upstart, outlaw image that hung over snowboarding, for better or worse, for its first ten years. Jake professes to believe that's all changing, as the march of time inevitably mainstreams yesterday's punks. Right now on the World Wide Web you can find more than 200 snowboard manufacturers hanging out their shingles. It's a sure bet, says Jim Spring and other analysts, that the field is going to quickly narrow.