What makes a successful snowboard company?

The state of the snowboard industry has been looking rather depressing recently. Companies such as Forum, Technine, and Nomis have been forced to either shut down sell off. With so many small companies forming in the snowboard world such as House of 1817, Spring Break snowboards, DWD, and many well established companies still struggling, how can a company become successful in this business? One of the main reason a lot of companies don't succeed is because it is very hard for them to differentiate themselves from other companies. There is not a huge difference in technology in different snowboard brands in fact, many companies get there snowboards from the same factories as each other and, they are almost identical. The problem is however, snowboards are about as advanced as they are ever going to get and, they are not particularly difficult to make.

 These are basically the exact same snowboard from two different companies

One of the ways successful companies distinguish themselves is by getting famous professional snowboard to support them. Most of the successful new companies are either started by Ex or current professional snowboarders or their friends. Companies such as House of 1817, started by professional snowboarder Joe Sexton, were able to become popular through this means. Other companies such as Nike snowboarding, or Salamon snowboarding, had already made lots of money outside of snowboarding and were able to hire all the best athletes to promote their products.

Good customer support/ Business practices. This one applies outside of snowboarding to every business clearly but, in a market so crowded with similar products at similar prices good customer service means a lot. A good example is Union binding company. When I first bought my bindings from them they broke relatively quickly and I emailed the company complaining about the product. In less than a day I got a response from them saying they would send me a new pair and they ended up sending me three brand new pairs of bindings. After this I have never and would never buy a different pair of bindings. Union started as a relatively small company a few years back and have already propelled themselves to the top of the market.

Doing something completely different. There are a couple examples of this but the best one I can think of is Spring Break snowboards. In an industry where basically everything is uniform going completely outside of the box can be an effective method. There is basically only one company in snowboarding you can buy a different shaped snowboard from and that is Spring Break snowboards. Their uniqueness allowed them stand alone from the other hundreds of snowboard companies and be successful.

More unique than functional but people still buy them.

http://snomie.com/snowboard-companies-fail/