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The Company That Changed Freeriding – 10 Years of Jones

A decade on, Jeremy Jones is still shaking up the snowboard market

“Time flies when you’re having fun! I can’t believe it’s been 10 years.”

Jeremy Jones’s voice is instantly recognisable from about a thousand snowboard movies. I’m speaking to him over Skype – me at my desk in a rain-lashed corner of England, him at his home in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Tahoe, California. On the wall above his head is an antique painting of a sailing ship, a memento of his roots back in Cape Cod.

It’s been quite a journey from the icy hills of the East Coast to his current status as the most famous freerider on the planet and head of a successful brand that bears his own name. This winter sees Jones Snowboards celebrate a decade in business. So how did it all start?

“I understood freeriding as good as anyone and I wanted to give it a go on my own, unfiltered – to build the company that I really wanted”

“I’d been a pro snowboarder for a long time,” he explains. “I’d been with Rossignol for 19 years and developed over 20 different products for them. My snowboarding had really shifted towards splitboarding – I was cutting boards in half, and hanging out with Shane McConkey a lot and talking about these new shape ideas and different profiles. I was super excited to embrace advanced splitboard technology, but Rossignol is a big company, so the lead times are longer – it just wasn’t as nimble as I wanted. I felt like I understood freeriding as good as anyone and I wanted to give it a go on my own, unfiltered – to build the company that I really wanted.”

PC: Jeff Curley

From the get go, Jones’s eponymous boards have been squarely focused on riders who share Jeremy’s passion for deep snow and riding fast. Although the shapes vary massively across the range – from stubby fish to big mountain guns – uniting them all is a commitment to performance, durability and sustainability.

“When we’re developing product we pay attention to all three of those things,” says Jeremy. “And then there’s what we call the ‘Ode to Progression’ which is a belief that all things can be made better, either through design or materials. Stagnation is not an option. That’s really the guts of it – our North Star.”

“All things can be made better, either through design or materials. Stagnation is not an option”

As a rider who tackles critical descents for breakfast, I wonder how Jeremy has dealt with the challenge of designing equipment for mere mortals like me. When you’re creating a brand in your own image, how do you put your own preferences to one side?

“I’ve always been immersed in local communities, and stand in lift lines like everyone else on a powder day,”  he says. “And I have a wide variety of friends of different abilities. A lot of my snowboarding is not with pro snowboarders, so I really understand that different people have different needs.”

PC: Jones Snowboards

That’s not to say that anything in the current range is watered down or bland. “I have a strong belief that ‘something for everyone and everything’ is really something for no one. So we’re always honest with saying ‘this board is awesome for this type of snowboarding, it’s not awesome for this type of snowboarding’. And that’s the way it is – there’s a bunch of boards in our line and you gotta find the right one.”

“A lot of my snowboarding is not with pro snowboarders, so I really understand that different people have different needs”

When Jeremy hooked up with renowned surf shaper Chris Christenson a few years ago , that product line took on a whole other dimension with the launch of the Surf Series. Christenson drew on his experience building wave craft to create all new outlines and rockers, but perhaps most interesting of all was his organic approach, which began with pencil lines sketched onto a piece of wood. Surfing’s great advantage, Christenson believes, is the hands-on nature of its build process, and the speed with which new ideas can be tested and brought to market.

“This year’s Flagship was three years and 45 snowboards in the making. It’s the most R&D we’ve ever done on a board”

It’s a lesson Jeremy has taken on board, and while snowboard manufacturing can never be quite as simple as a guy in a garage shaving a foam blank, his brand has put structures in place to ensure rapid product evolution.

“The amount that we prototype is significant,” he explains. “Like, this year’s Flagship was three years and 45 snowboards in the making. It’s the most R&D we’ve ever done on a board – and we had no fixed end point in mind. We went down a bunch of dead ends, and it wasn’t done until it was done – quite frankly we didn’t know if we could make a better Flagship.”

Jeremy shredding with his son, Cass PC: Andrew Miller

Make it they did, culminating in the new 10th anniversary edition. For Jeremy, this was a more important update than most.

“Out of all the boards in the line, that’s the one I’m most sensitive to changing,” he says. “That’s my high performance – for lack of a better word, ‘contest’ – board. When I’m at home I ride different stuff all the time, but when it comes time to travel, I’m bringing a Flagship, cos if it’s ice, crud, cliffs, powder… that board handles everything. 95 percent of the footage you’ve seen of me in the movies is on a Flagship.

Jones Flagship 2019/20
Jones Flagship 2019/20
Jones Flagship 2019/20

“So it’s the scariest one to make changes to, and we made big changes – which is why it took so many years and so many iterations. For example the nose shape of that board, it’s the best nose we’ve ever done. I really paid it a lot of attention cos I feel like 90 percent of falls start because something goes wrong at the nose. Once you get under the feet, it’s really a high performance race board, and this year we added some taper which we went back and forth on a lot, and it’s really helped with stability, and keeping the nose out of the junk.” 

“We just had what I think is a pretty big breakthrough in snowboarding, which you’ll see with our mid-season release”

The 10th anniversary Flagship is proof, then – to cite the Ode to Progression – that there is always room for improvement. Each time Jones go back to the drawing board, Jeremy insists, they learn something new.

“We just had what I think is a pretty big breakthrough in snowboarding, which you’ll see with our mid-season release,” he reveals with genuine excitement. “It’s called The Stratos, and it’s opened our eyes to a bunch of new concepts that I think you will see ripple out through the whole line – just as you can see touches from Christenson’s curves through the whole line at this point.

PC: Jones Snowboards

Alongside the goal of improved performance is that of sustainability. As a bonafide outdoorsman and the founder of Protect Our Winters, it’s a subject close to Jeremy’s heart. There have been various milestones for his company along the way, from the adoption of FSC-approved wood cores to a recent switch to 100 percent solar power at the factory. Smaller decisions have been implemented since day one – such as recycled sidewalls and edges, water-based inks, and flip flop bases that minimize p-tex waste – and these have also played their part in reducing the company’s overall footprint, especially when added up over a whole decade. 

Challenges remain, however, not least regarding the all-important fibreglass resin. “When it comes to durability, resin is key,” Jeremy concedes. “That’s what keeps the board together. It’s the hardest thing to change, and it’s also the most toxic thing in a board. But we’ve recently been able to incorporate 33 percent bio-resin into the mix.” 

“We recognise that the boards have an environmental impact. We don’t hide from that”

In the end, as Chris Christenson made plain in his own Whitelines interview, building surfboards or snowboards will always come at a cost, so the longer a product lasts the better. Jeremy agrees:

“We will never stop looking for the most sustainable materials, and the cleanest ways to make our boards, but we recognise that the boards have an environmental impact. We don’t hide from that, which is why, for example, we really try to do timeless graphics – we wanna make sure our stuff lasts. It’s very common people come up and say ‘I’m getting a new board, I’ve been on it a couple of years,’ and time and again I’m like, ‘You need a tune, not a new board.’

PC: Andrew Miller

Outside of their manufacturing efforts, Jones Snowboards are a member of One Percent for the Planet, committing them to donating a significant chunk of their sales to green causes. “It’s a big driver for me,” says Jeremy, “because it’s a David vs Goliath battle. You really see that we [in the green movement] are totally under-resourced. So we continue to raise more money for the environment and write big cheques.”

Those cheques include funds for a reforestation project in Costa Rica, which is one of the things Jeremy is most excited about when he looks forward to the next 10 years. “We have this wonderful Jones rainforest, and I know for sure that thing’s gonna be three, five, ten times bigger than it is today.”

Pushed on what else we can expect to see from the brand by 2029, he’s a little more coy. 

“Gosh, I’m not very good at looking long term – I don’t even look at the long-term weather forecast!” he laughs. “I think we will continue to get better at what we do, cos we love creating these products, and I do think that 10 years from now we will probably won’t be so singularly focused on just snowboarding. I’ll leave it at that…”

PC: Jones Snowboards

It’s an intriguing possibility, and we’ll just have to wait and see what new directions he might have in mind. In the meantime, Jeremy’s basic motivation remains as strong as it was when the company began.

“I truly love seeing my boards out on the mountain, and big smiles on people’s faces. That to me is the ultimate compliment”

“I truly love seeing my boards out on the mountain,” he says, “and big smiles on people’s faces, and having them come up and be like ‘Oh my god I just love this board, thank you!’ That to me is the ultimate compliment, and it’s what led to me calling them ‘Instruments of Stoke’ – because at this point I’m probably pushing 35 years of snowboarding and I’m like, ‘Why has it captivated me so long?’ And the answer is just the joy that it brings me, and to see the joy that these snowboards bring to other people. It really makes me feel good.”

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