Wild world of sports

Entrepreneur, Feb, 1999 by Christopher D. Lancette

Thrills, spills, and yes, even chills. Real-life entrepreneurs share their secrets for riding the wave of a sports trend.

Jake Burton and his buddies come flying down a mountain on snowboards he invented. One guy swoops back and forth through the powder, while the others leap off cliffs and catch bursts of air. They look as if they're about to crash and die. But they don't. They land smooth as silk and keep on cruising.

Cut to Burton making his pitch for the American Express card in a recent TV commercial: He says he likes the company because it gives him the freedom to do things his way. That means with lots of passion, the precious juice fueling the empire that raced out of his garage.

"There's no question that to be successful with a new sport, you have to live it," says Burton, 44. "And you can't live it if you don't love it."

Fellow entrepreneurs and experts agree. If you're an adrenaline-burning capitalist who wants to turn an idea for a new sport or sports product into a business, you've got to do it for the love of it. Just like Burton. Just like Missy Samiee, who stepped right out of grad school into two companies geared toward active people like herself. And just like Jason Lee and Patrick McConnell, who invented a dry-land snowboard so they could keep right on ripping through the summer.

"The sporting goods industry is hungry for new sports," says Darren Drevik, editor of Sports Trend magazine. "In some ways, it's difficult for a new company to pitch its product, but if you're passionate, it can be easy."

Make no mistake: It can also be very hard. Like flying-off-a-poorly-designed-prototype-and-bashing-your-head-into-a-tree hard. And don't forget the other company-crushers you have to deal with: creating a demand for something people have never seen, opening your own sales outlets or persuading retailers to carry your goods, and running down copycats like road kill.

Sure, someone came up with a suspension system for your father's bicycle and now mountain-bikers rule the world. (Some 8.1 million people hit the trails last year, while another 16 million cruised the streets, according to the National Sporting Goods Association [NSGA].) And it seems you can't cross the street without dodging an inline skater. (The NSGA says there were more than 26 million bladers in 1997.) But no one can remember, let alone count, the number of products that never saw the light of day, or the ones that did and then quickly disappeared.

Do you have what it takes to start a brand-new craze? If so, you'd better listen up before you take that leap of faith. If you don't read on, your jazzy product may more likely end up in a dumpster than on store shelves.

THE KING OF SNOW

Jake Burton had been using a toy called a "snurfer" (for "snow surfer") since high school, and went on to modify its design to his own specifications during his college years at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and New York University. After college and a brief stint as a wage slave, Burton decided to follow his dream of designing and creating snowboards. The year was 1977, long before anyone had ever heard of the X Games - the "extreme" version of the Olympics that's now a symbol of Gen X athletics.

With start-up money from an inheritance and the income from summer jobs, Burton began his venture in the garage of his Londonderry, Vermont, home, cranking out boards and taking orders over the phone. Though a few other companies were beginning to produce snowboards at the same time, Burton Snowboards' sales escalated. Word of mouth, the all-important ingredient in the success of a new sports product, spread across the country - propelling Burton to move to a new, larger facility in Burlington, Vermont.

"I came close to bailing several times," Burton admits. "If I hadn't been so persistent, it never would have happened. In the early days, we had to create the demand for the product."

That meant spending money to make videos and organize competitions to grow the sport. Those tasks, along with research and development, were capital-intensive projects. "It cost me $100,000 to turn the corner then," Burton says. "Now it would cost $20 million to get into the snowboard market."

Burton's new plant allowed him to increase production and reach out to new markets. In 1982, he began the grass-roots effort that gave birth to the sport - and his second office - in Japan. Three years later, he went over to Europe to research ski technology and figure out how to improve his boards. That trip went so well, he opened a third office - this time in Austria.

The company's three-pronged assault on snow consistently increased demand over the course of the next 10 years. Then, from 1995 to 1998, the company took another leap - adding 215 employees to the 372 already on board to keep up with customers clamoring for its boards.

Anybody with two snowflakes between their ears can tell you the multimillion-dollar company is a world leader in the snowboard industry. Whether they're riding on the slopes of the Rockies or the Alps, there's a good chance snowboarders you see have Burton's fiberglass under their feet. And Burton intends to keep it that way.