I don’t really want to cut and paste the entire interview, but I’m going to do it anyway…thanks to Trent Edwards for the publicity:
“Handmade in Calgary, Canada”
These words are printed in all-capital, bold letters on the bottom of every custom snowboard Jason Broz makes. You won’t find them on any other board in the world, because Broz is the only snowboard maker in the city, or in the province for that matter.
There are no posters or clutter in Broz’s windowless workshop behind his showroom in a northeast industrial park. The floor is swept clean. Hundreds of wooden board cores are neatly stacked on giant metal shelves against the walls. Thousands of binding inserts are stored in clear plastic containers on yet more shelves.
In the back of the workshop, behind the snowboard-making machinery, thousands of metres of plastic topsheets with custom graphics created by Broz and several local artists lie on a rack waiting to be pressed onto board cores.
“I’m a minimalist,” Broz explains. “I like things clean.”
Leaning up against a custom snowboard-shaping machine used to press the plastic top and base onto each of his snowboards, Broz is clean-shaven and clean-cut in a white hoodie, jeans and all-white sneakers.
He seems perfectly placed to accomplish his ambitious goal — putting Calgary on the snowboarding world’s map. Broz hasn’t vaulted this city onto that stage yet, but he’s getting there.
“There’s enormous talent here in Calgary,” he says.
Broz grew up in Vancouver, falling in love with snowboarding in high school. When he graduated, he skipped post-secondary schooling to snowboard 80 days each winter, becoming good enough to make the national freestyle snowboarding junior team. (At 32, he still squeezes 20 riding days into his busy winter schedule to test his boards and stay in touch with his favourite sport.)
Determined not to get an office job, Broz started making snowboards out of his parents’ garage. Self-taught, he would make a board, test it on a slope and often bring it back in pieces to fix it in the garage. Soon, he found his interest in making boards surpassing his urge to ride them.
“My passion shifted quickly,” he recalls.
Eleven years later, he has the skills to make excellent boards from scratch, tailored to any rider’s needs. He models himself after custom surfboard shapers, who get a sense of each rider they shape for and build a unique creation tailored to that customer.
“I build every single board as if it’s my own. If I’m not proud of it, it doesn’t leave the door,” Broz says. “I have very few warranty returns.”
In 2005, Broz entered one of his board designs, the Paavo 157, into TransWorld Snowboarding magazine’s annual Good Wood competition. His board, made for Vancouver-based Endeavor Snowboards because his company was too small to enter the competition, was up against 150 of the world’s best snowboard-making companies in the men’s boards category.
With a broad range of riders grading the boards purely on performance, Broz’s entry made the top-10 list. (Boards in the list were not ranked from top to bottom.)
It doesn’t cost much more for one of Broz’s creations than a factory-built model. Broz’s Calgary snowboard boutique, Clyde Snowboards, charges $419 for a board featuring a stylish Clyde graphic. For $595, a rider can bring in their own graphic.
Since moving to Calgary, Broz has signed a strong team of local riders to his label. Now he says Clyde’s prospects are unlimited, and he’s selling enough boards across Canada to keep himself busy year-round. A proud Canadian, he gets almost all his materials from Canadian sources, including ash board cores from Quebec. (Some parts can only be found overseas, he says.)
Broz doesn’t want to be the next Burton, but he does want his work to be ridden and appreciated on snow-covered slopes around the globe.
“I believe in what I’m doing, keeping it small,” Broz says. “And I think people appreciate that, too. They like that underground sort of thing where they’re getting something really, really limited.”
And handmade in Calgary.
For more on Broz’s boards, you can check out his website at: www.clydesnowboards.com
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