The featured speakers at the recent Volvo SportsDesign Forum made no bones about it: Women athletes have deserved their own product lines, events and status in the sports world and culture from the beginning.
Burton Snowboards owners Jake Burton Carpenter and Donna Carpenter espouse this belief. Burton was offering equal prize money to women and men snowboarders at the annual U.S. Open 15 years before other events considered it.
“It wasnt me that made girls riding happen,” Jake said before a packed house of 720 sports industry officials, designers, retailers and media at the New Munich Trade Fair Centre. “It was the girls themselves. And once they made that choice, we didnt shy away from the investments needed to make women products happen and develop in the right away.”
Added Donna Carpenter, “Weve been women-specific for over ten years with the influence of our athletes, such as (former champions) Nicola Thost and Shannon Dunn. Before that, we always promoted girls and women to ride.”
Jake and Donna showcased an event that celebrated women-specific products as the emerging retail product leader in the sporting goods industry. Among other snow sports companies representing their womens programs at the forum were Rossignol and Salomon. The Carpenters presentation included clips of womens snowboarders through the years, along with a point-to-point description of Burtons innovative womens manufacturing, marketing and merchandising programs. As with other elements of the company, they are leading-edge in both snowboarding and the snow sports industry.
“We decided, as we wanted to grow into a multi-image brand in the world, that we needed to recruit, promote and retain more women in leadership positions,” Donna Carpenter said. “As a result, our restructuring of soft goods, for example, was a takedown of the mens shrink it and pink it concept. So now we have a wall between our mens and womens creative teams.”
Donna Carpenter cited the grassroots work of Dunn in the United States and Thost in Europe as indicative of Burtons commitment to women-and its full understanding of the differences between male and female snowboarders. “I think what inspires women to snowboard is very different from men,” she said. “They like a sense of community and mutual support. They also like to rip and ride the pipe, but its more about community.”
She went on to break down Burtons three-part plan for moving forward with the womens initiative-which could well serve as a model for the entire snow sports industry:
- Accessibility. “We want to make sure the sport is as accessible to as many women as possible. We have Learn to Ride snowboard centers and camps, a shop girl initiative with retailers that rewards them for hiring women employees and a campaign that promotes the image of having fun in the snow with friends.”
- Vision. “We want to have a clear sense of who the customers are. One mistake male-dominated companies make is this vague idea of the womens market, when its really many different markets. We take women seriously without compromising their identity or femininity.”
- Women-Led Design and Creative Teams. “We need women to make strategic decisions, which we carry out with our increasing number of women executives and managers, and with women in the marketplace, in the field. We will never know how far we can take this concept if we never involve women in all aspects of decision-making.”
When asked about the future participation numbers of women in snowboarding, Jake offered up a response that surprised many. “I think that, potentially, there will be more girls than boys on snowboards,” he said, alluding to a study by Kathleen Gasperini of Label Networks that showed three times as many American girls want to learn snowboarding in the next five years as boys. “They are coming on strong, and its only going to get stronger.”
