Behind The Creation of Snowboardings Most Fun Brand | “… we decided that our short term goal was 3 t-shirts + a beer-cuzzi.”
Airblaster is still having more fun than any other brand in snowboarding thanks to the efforts of co-founders Travis Parker and Jesse Grandkoski. This interview with Jesse goes into how they built it out of Montana and kept it going strong for 15-years.
Sample:
HOW DID THE CONCEPT FOR AIRBLASTER FIRST COME UP?
JG: For me, it was about being able to pursue snowboarding as a viable lifestyle and finding enough of a commercial angle to pay my student debt, without sacrificing the freedom that I had found in the sport. I needed to keep that freedom or leave and find it somewhere else. I think that all three of us truly loved snowboarding, but were each a bit burned out or disillusioned about it in different ways. However, we were not ready to entirely give it up.
For me, a big part of the founding of Airblaster was making the decision not to let all the BS that I perceived in snowboarding to push me away from this activity that I love so much. I decided that I wanted to communicate what snowboarding meant to me, share this perspective, and this set of ideals. I felt like someone needed to share this perspective, that snowboarding is about friends, freedom, and fun and not cool vibes, sponsorship, or some strange hierarchy based on freestyle credentials. We had no idea what products we were going to make. At the end of the first meeting, we decided that our short term goal was three t-shirts and a beer-cuzzi.
Click to TETON GRAVITY RESEARCH for the interview with Airblaster co-founder Jesse Grandkoski
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