1. Photo. Mike Fraser
the
marvelously
mad world of
Three Decades of Domestic
Manufacturing andthe Mavericks
who Mismanaged Expectations
words and photos by Brian Peech
Much has changed in the 35 years since Mike Olson crafted his first snowboard.The
board sports industry has seen staggering growth in a relatively short period of time,
surf companies now answer to stockholders, core shops compete with mall chains, and
snowboarders, once banned from resorts, are becoming Olympians.
While most brands have long since moved production off shore to cheaper labour
markets, tucked neatly along the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula, lies a modest
factory. Flanked by lush old-growth, sparkling lakes and mountains of varying shades
of gray, it’s a place where the motivation to be intimately involved in the manufacturing
process is unwavering, where time seems to stand still and where, on any given day (if it’s
not a powder day), you can still find Olson and his partner Pete Saari dreaming up new
ways to buck convention.
This is the story of Mervin Manufacturing—the last holdout of the great
North American board builders.
Mervin co-founders Pete Saari and Mike Olson say they still
feel the same passion for board building three decades on.
Mervin
158 159

2. 160 161
“There was nothing around to tell us if we were doing
it right or that snowboards would actually work—we
sorta had to make up our own world.” —Pete Saari
It’s 1977 and Mike Olson—teenager in a small, work-
ing-class, Northwest town, son of a commercial
fisherman, carefree skateboarder—had just begun
eighth grade. Like most of his classmates, he’d seen
early incarnations of the snowboard—Snurfers, he
calls them—as well as the offerings from toy manu-
facturer Coleco at the local hardware store. Like
most of his classmates, he really wanted one.
Eventually, while pouring over the pages of an
early Skateboarder Magazine, Olson came across
a picture of BobWebber, who had been making
snowboards a little more advanced than what could
be found in the J.C. Penney catalogue.
“I was taking a shop class and thought, ‘I need to
make something that looks like that,’” Olson says, his
eyes wide with the animated, boyish excitement he’s
become known for. “And I did, I made one out of door
skins, polyester resin and fiberglass. It actually had
steel edges on it, which rusted the day I took it home.
The board worked horribly.
“My neighbour, Siggy Hartman, had a steep hill in
his yard and a big St. Bernard that would chase us,”
he continues, his hands carving out the scene in the
air. “I remember standing up on the hill with this St.
Bernard staring at me. And the board wouldn’t slide.
My board wouldn’t slide!”
Olson figured, years later, the board’s lack of
performance was likely due to using ill-suited
wax he’d received as a gift.
“I had no idea,” he says. “I put some wax on that a
friend had given me for my birthday that had a price
tag of, like, $2. Back then, that was a lot of money, so I
saved it for a special occasion. It was like honey; it
got all over my hands. I had no idea it was
cross-country ski wax.”
The following year, needing another project for
class, Olson decided to try again.This time, he
added fiberglass fins, waterski bindings and rubber
straps to the board. He waxed it with proper ski wax
and hauled it up to Mission Ridge, a local ski resort
east of the Cascades.
“I took it out at the end of a ski day, thinking it
wouldn’t work, thinking I’d stick to the snow again,”
he says. “I hiked up some hardpack and started
going down. I was blown away that it was fast, and
I blew right through a little snow bank of powder
thinking that it was going to be a challenge. I was
not intending to hit the powder, but once I hit it, the
board lifted and just worked.”
The next day, Olson didn’t bother with a lift ticket.
He and his brother took turns hiking sections of
powder, putting his new creation through its paces.
“I was already a skateboarder, so I didn’t really
have to learn how to make this work, I just cranked
some turns,” he says. “We were just blown away. And,
well, the rest is history.”
As Olson made his way through high school, he
continued making boards in woodshop, but soon
found he could make them better at home.
“I didn’t have any equipment at home, but I had
time. So at night, I would actually make the skeletons
of these boards, these cores. I would lay them out
and laminate them up at home, then bring them to
class to fiberglass them,” he says.
“Iwasusingtheschoolsystemtomakemyboards,
andImadethemallthewaythroughhighschool.”
Pete Saari is the VP of Creativity at Mervin. His
salt-and-pepper stubble betrays his underlying
youthfulness. He’s quick to laugh and holds himself
almost aloof, more like a teenager than a man who
helped build one of the largest snowboard brands
in the world. He certainly doesn’t take himself too
seriously. He wears a trucker hat emblazoned with
the word “Bitchin’” in big bubble letters that can be
read from across the room.
“The first time I saw snowboarding was in old
copies of Surfer Magazine,” he says. “I thought it
looked like fun, but I just really didn’t connect with it.
I was mostly a skateboarder and a skier at the time.
I wanted to do it, but I couldn’t really access it.”
Around that time, Saari ran into Olson, a
surfing buddy, while searching for waves on the
coast. He had been making his own surfboards
by then, and Olson was now making his own
surfboards and snowboards.
“Mike would drag me up the mountain and say,
‘You’re not skiing, you’re gonna snowboard,’” he
jokes. “And I was like, ‘Oh, OK. Alright, I’ll do it.’”
Saari became hooked. But at that point snow-
boarding wasn’t even in its infancy—its parents
had barely even met.
“When we started snowboarding, people looked
at us like we were nuts. Like, you’d show up at the hill
and you stood out like a sore thumb. And at that age,
I didn’t necessarily want to stand out.”
Eventually, Olson needed help building
snowboards and asked Saari to join him.
“I jumped at it. I was in college, and I knew I
wanted to be involved in skiing,” he says. “While
this wasn’t quite skiing, it was board building and
I wanted to build boards.”
Olson had started up Delbert Pumpernickel
Gravity Harness No Guarantee snowboards, and
had been at it about a year when the two began
working together to create Gnu. (Olson originally
liked the nameWildebeest, but a marketing teacher
had once suggested a brand’s name should be short,
like, three to four letters. Looking up “wildebeest” in
the dictionary, right next to it was “gnu.”)The brand
was released under the company SlopeTools Inc., a
name Saari admits was likely borrowed from Lance
Collins’ WaveTools surf brand. Years later, the brand
name LibTech came to Olson at 3 a.m. after a night
of building boards. He’d written “LiberaceTechnolo-
gies” on a sparkly topsheet, a nod to the flamboyant
pianist. Unable to secure trademark for Liberace,
Olson and Saari settled on LibTech.
Through various business dealings, SlopeTools
faded away and Mervin Manufacturing was born
around 1988. “The company was named after our
good friend, Mervin, who we used to go surfing with,”
says Saari. “He was the first guy to get married and
kind of fall away.”
Olson had been finding work where he could to
help finance his lifestyle, as well as his business
endeavours—whatever it took to keep churning out
and carving on his boards.
“In the early days, we started out in Mike’s
garage,” says Saari. “Mike used to clean the gutters
of this old woman’s house, and she rented us a one-
stall horse barn that had some power to it. He’d go in
and layup the boards and I would rout out the shape
and slots for the edges. It built up from there, and
eventually we ended up in a small business park.
“We’ve always been inWashington,” Saari con-
tinues. “We grew up in the Northwest with kind of a
Northwest inferiority complex. I always thought the
ski magazines would only run shots ofTahoe, Utah,
Montana, Wyoming and Mammoth. So we always
thought, ‘Our snow’s good, too, but they don’t ever
show pictures of it, it must not be that good.’ I’d
wonder what really good snow was like.”
This isolation, or inferiority complex as Saari
describes it, proved to be one of the key ingredients
to Mervin’s success.
“It’slikewhenwestartedsurfinguphere,wedidn’t
knowthatthewaveswererideable,”hesays.“We
didn’tunderstandit.Andthesamewentwithsnow-
boarding.Therewasnothingaroundto tellusifwe
weredoingitrightorthatsnowboardswouldactually
work—wesortahadto makeupourownworld.”
ST. BERNARDS AND HONEY WAX
SOMETIMES YOU JUSTGOTTA GETYOUR HANDS STICKY
A NORTHWEST INFERIORITY COMPLEX IN A ONE-HORSE BARN
THE BIRTH OF MERVIN MANUFACTURING
Keeping production at home allows
Mervin to experiment with different
species of wood in its cores, and be on
the mountain, testing within days.

3. 162 163
Mervin Manufacturing employs over 180
people at its Sequim,WA (population: 6,606)
factory, with three shifts handcrafting boards
nearly 24 hours a day. Recently, the company
opened an office in the Freemont area of
Seattle, which houses another 20 employees
and one mini-ramp. Although Mervin is a global
business, operating its European hub out of
Prague with reps and agents in nearly every
country worldwide, its heart and soul remain
in the Pacific Northwest.
Norm Nelson, Efficiency and EnvironMEN-
TAL Dude (his official title—it’s on his business
card) is going on 17 years at Mervin. Originally
from the East, Nelson sports a thick beard and
looks most comfortable in a pair of shorts and
Sorels. He boasts a love for salmon fishing
that’s found him completely at home here.
He’s the guy who keeps a pocketknife at the
ready and can damn well fix anything with it.
Nelson believes in community. So when
the local college approached Mervin, one of
the top employers in the area (the town
named a road in the company’s honour), to help
create a composites program at the school,
he jumped at the opportunity. He now sits on
the curriculum-forming board.
“The program will teach kids, or retrain
displaced workers from the logging industry or
wherever else, so they can then find employ-
ment,” he says. “We can move it on down the
line and bring up everybody. It’s not just about
stockholders or certain little parts, it’s about
bringing everybody up at the same time.
“We feel like we’re part of the community,”
he continues, “So we need to function as a
part of that community.We need to be actively
involved.We need to be hiring people from
the community, investing in the community,
and they’ll invest in us.”
But keeping everything in-house has its
strategic advantages, as well.
“We can go from an idea to a prototype to
actually riding on the hill in a day or two,” Nelson
says. “Then, if we like it, we can make 72 of
these boards a day.We have our own wood core
shop, our own presses, our own side sanding
machines, our own tooling for all the presses;
so if we want to try something different, like an
asymmetric core with a couple different species
of wood, we can do all that.We can control every
part of the puzzle.”
Nelson has given hundreds of tours of the
Mervin factory over the years, and he’s still
taken aback by the reaction to the plant.
“Whether it’s somebody who’s toured a
bunch of factories, somebody who’s been in the
industry, or somebody who’s never seen any
sort of factory—snowboard or otherwise—it’s
always interesting to hear all the different per-
spectives, like, ‘I thought it would be noisier, or
dirtier, or smellier.’ But the biggest thing I hear is,
‘I can’t believe how much handwork is involved.
I didn’t realize how many people touched it.’ It
really is handmade.There are no robots.”
“Wecanactuallybuildonanideawithouthaving
abigtoolingcharge,”addsSaari.“Itdoesn’tcostus
$20,000totryanewsnowboard.Sothatopens
adoorthat’sclosedtoalotofpeople.Onceyou
openthatdoor,youcanhavealotoffun.
“Keeping our manufacturing at home,
keeping it local has always been really impor-
tant to us,” Olson says. “A few years ago, no one
really cared when we said, Handmade in the
USA. It just really wasn’t that much of a selling
point when there wasn’t a focus on outsourcing.
Now, with the economic downturn, it’s all of a
sudden been in the spotlight, and for anyone
that makes their product at home in North
America, it really does help sales.”
In the late ’90s, as the majority of snowboard
brands—if they hadn’t already done so—start-
ed moving production to China, Mervin resisted
the pressure.
“Iremember havingsomemagazinescomeby
for interviews,”recallsOlson. “Andthey’dlookat
usandgo, ‘Areyouguyscrazy?You’renotsending
your productoffshoretothesecheaper labour
markets?You’regoingtogooutofbusiness.’”
But for Olson, letting go of production just
wasn’t what Mervin was about.
“It was more than the pride of making it here
in America. I do love that, but in that era when
everyone was going offshore, it wasn’t like I was
clinging to, ‘Yeah, let’s make ’em here, because
it’s made in America.’That’s cool, and I appreci-
ate that, but the real reason was that we like
to make our own boards.We really, really love
making every type of board.”
Saari alsosaysthedecisiontokeepitdomes-
ticstemslessfromnational prideandmorefrom
anintrinsicneedtobeintimatelyconnectedto
theproduct, andthefreedomtotinker.
“We’ve had a lot of pressure over the years
to build things in China,” says Saari. “But, for
us, it really just wasn’t part of our program.We
aren’t a marketing company.We started as a
board-building company that physically builds
boards, and that’s what we still are today,”
he continues. “Rather than go to China, we’ve
just worked harder to be more efficient in our
factory, to buy our materials more efficiently,
to run a tighter ship here.
“It always has a cost, but we only sell to the
one part of the market,” he explains. “We sell to
the high-end part of the market because that’s
where we fit price-wise and brand story-wise
and quality-wise.We don’t touch the bottom
part of the market, where a lot of the Chinese
boards end up.That’s usually a tough market;
it’s really competitive and there’s not a lot of
margin.We decided we’d rather be smaller, do
lower volume, but make money on each board
and be able to do it ourselves.”
Mervin dabbled in making boards in China
once, when demand for product outgrew its
output capabilities, admits Saari, “but it turned
out nobody wants boards from us built in China,”
he says. “They looked at us like, ‘What are you
guys doing?’ So no one even bought one.”
Iftherewasany lingeringdoubtMervin’sdeci-
siontokeepitsoperationdomestichasmoreto
dowiththeDIYethoscoursingthroughSaariand
Olson’sDNAthangoodol’fashionedAmerican
pride, one needonly lookatthestickeradorning
everyboardthatleavestheMervinplant.
“For import/export we had to have ‘Made in
the USA’ stickers on our boards,” explains Olson.
“Shortly after George Bush stole the election
in 2000, I remember walking into our purchas-
ing department in Seattle and asked, ‘Can we
change that to “Handcrafted Near Canada”?’
I drew up the sticker, and from that point on
we’ve been Handcrafted Near Canada.”
“We have a big kitchen here where we can
cook up snowboards,” Saari continues. “And
we’ve developed a culture in the shop, where if
someone gets an idea, it doesn’t get shut down.
It doesn’t matter who it is.There’s just a joy in
going, ‘Hey, we’ve got an idea. Let’s build it.’ I
think that’s what we all still get off on: having a
new idea, or working with a team rider if they’ve
got an idea, and going, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s build on
that, let’s do it.’That’s still the joy that keeps
Mike and I coming to work every day.”
“There were over 400 brands in North America.
And we knew there was going to be a crash.
Other brands were kind of in denial. They’d talk
about growth, growth, growth, but we knew it
wasn’t happening.” —Mike Olson
THE BIG KITCHEN IN SEQUIM
LASTSTOP FOR DOWN HOME COOKING
The office where Saari and Olson punch the
clock is filled with memorabilia, dog-eared
magazines, frayed snowboard bags, and
framed and fading advertisements from
years gone by.

4. 164 165
Sometimes all it takes is one idea, at precisely the
right time, to launch a series of events that catapult
a business to previously undreamt success. Mervin
called this idea “Banana.”
After years of mashing wild concepts together,
Mervin introduced what, in 2006, was possibly one
of the strangest-looking snowboards the industry
had seen in years. Rocker between the bindings,
flat-to-mild cambers running from the inserts to
the traditional contacts, Banana technology looked
nothing short of a gimmick, a wavy board no one had
necessarily been asking for. Add to that the serrated
edges Mervin was now calling “Magne-Traction,”
and you had a creation more suited to Pee Wee’s
Playhouse than a snowboard rack.
ButifOlsonandSaariknewonething,it’sthat
Banana worked.Itworkedreally well.Alltheyneeded
wastogetitunderthefeetofsnowboarders,andthe
restwouldtakecareofitself.
“In 2008, right around the time pretty much the
whole world—unless you were India or Brazil or
China—went into an economic tailspin, I almost felt
guilty because, for us, the opposite happened,” Olson
says. “People would ask, ‘How’s the business doing?’
I almost felt like saying, ‘Yeah, we’re struggling,’
because everyone was struggling. But the opposite
happened for us.That’s when we struck gold with
Banana and Magne-Traction.
“All of sudden, we hit massive growth,” he contin-
ues. “When everyone was downsizing, we were add-
ing new buildings as fast as we could out here. We
couldn’t get any more building permits, so we were
going to our neighbours, asking, ‘Hey, can you build us
a new building?’ As of last count, I think we have 17 or
19 buildings we’re in now.”
It was time to quickly re-evaluate the business,
and according to Saari, with growth came a certain
amount of pain. “You have new hires, you have
to train people. Suddenly, all these systems that
worked well when you had five guys don’t work well
when there are 20 guys, and those don’t work well
now when you have 50.
“You just have to grow, and usually that comes
with pain. You’ve got to re-evaluate yourself,
whether you like it or not, and re-evaluate your
processes and just be more on it,” he says. “I think in
any industry, or for any rider—if a rider gets big all
of a sudden, they’ve got more people asking for
them, they’re suddenly in demand more than they
can deal with and they get headaches. But those
can be good headaches if you can step back from
them and re-evaluate.”
It’s 2012, and Mervin has seen sustainable growth
year over year for the past eight.What now? Bugger
off to aTahitian island and celebrate over a few
hundred banana daiquiris? Not quite.
Coasting isn’t a word in the Mervin vocabulary.
Instead, Olson hunkered down to finally realize his
lifelong dream of introducing a domestically made,
ecologically responsible surfboard to a market
steeped in traditional shaping methods.This was the
year of theWaterboard.
“Surfboards have been probably my biggest
obsession from Day 1,” says Olson. “I used to go to
the local library with my brother, and we’d get these
old surf books from the ’60s, and I became obsessed
with wanting to surf.
“I was already building my own skateboards, and
I’d started experimenting with these crude early
snowboards in shop class, but I really wanted to build
my own surfboard. But at that time in the Northwest,
nobody even realized you could surf. It wasn’t a
concept,” he says.
“I’d asked my dad about the waves. He just
looked at me and went, ‘Yeah, there’s waves. I think
we have some of the biggest waves in the world.’
And I asked, ‘Why can’t you surf our coast?’ And he
says, ‘I’m sure you can.’”
It was hard to get a surfboard in the Northwest
in the’70s, so out of neccesity Olson set out to make
his own.While the idea to mass-produce boards was
decades off, the seed was planted.
“What we’re doing now is nothing like anything
else that’s ever been done with a surfboard,” he
says. “A lot of what we’re doing could not have been
done even two years ago. A lot of these materials,
these processes, didn’t exist yet. I’ve had to wait
for certain pieces to fall into place in the indus-
trial world. And now we have them, and it all came
together. And it’s still evolving,” he continues. “There
are materials that I’m evolving into that still don’t
exist, that I will have in two years that I don’t have
now,” says Olson, who is decisively tight-lipped about
the details, even refusing to allow Mervin’s sales
reps a tour of the surf factory.
“So far, it’s going incredibly well,” he says. “Our
biggest problem is that we have more sales than we
know what to do with. We didn’t know that was going
to happen when we entered the market. I thought
a few retail shops would just order a few boards to
see how they’d go, but a lot of shops ordered 20, 30
boards.We even had a shop order 70 boards as their
first order,” he says. “So we instantly got caught with
our pants down.”
According to Olson, unlike the skate market,
in which LibTech had seen some success but also
received a lot of resistance in the Orange County
and San Diego territories, the surfboards have been
well-received in the heart of the industry.
“The industry really is based in So Cal, and that
was our hardest market to crack with skate.
Because you have all the brands headquartered
there, and doing everything they can to not let you
succeed in their market,” he says. “And of course, in
surf, to some extent, we’re probably going to face a
little of that, but it’s a little different than the skate
market.To be honest, it’s a kinder, gentler industry
than the skate industry.
“So far, the feedback we’ve gotten from almost
all the industry heavies, they’ve given us a big kudos,”
he says. “They love that we make it ourselves, that
we’re not offshoring it, and that we really are making
a change. How can you say anything bad about it, re-
ally? It’s more environmental, we make it ourselves,
and they surf great, they really do.That’s the bottom
line—they just feel really good.”
While crafting surfboards wasn’t a new thing for
Olson or Saari, it wasn’t as intuitive an addition to
the Mervin arsenal as Narrow Ass Snowboards, or as
most people call them, skis.
“The first experimental skis we made right when
Salomon was getting big in the early ’90s,” Olson
explains. “They entered the ski market, and they
claimed it took something like six years and $6
million to build their first ski, and it was going to
revolutionize the ski industry. And it did.”
“So we set out to make a ski equivalent to theirs,
and claim that we can do it in one weekend for under
a thousand dollars. And we did,” he says. “We made
a couple dozen of them that year, for trophies at
Mount Baker.
“We kind of sat on that for a few years,” he
continues. “And then, just recently, with all our good
buddies who ski bugging us, we went, ‘You know
what? Let’s make some narrow-ass snowboards.’
“We sold them as individuals,” he adds. “Some
people bought them over the Internet and were
real surprised when only one showed up.”
It was only logical for Mervin to apply Magne-
Traction to the skis.Whether the technology will
see the success in the ski world as it has in
snowboarding is yet to be seen.
“I think the ski industry doesn’t really understand
or know about that yet,” Olson says. “We haven’t
really marketed it that hard. But I think there’s still
a little revolution to be had in skis.”
Saari agrees. “I think we have something to offer
skiing with Magne-Traction,” he says. “There’s no
other ski company that offers serrated edges, and
I think there’s a place for that in the ski world. I
think some day, someone’s going to win aWorld Cup
race on a ski with serrated edges, and I’m kind of
waiting for that day.”
But the real motivation behind branching out
into the ski world is, in typical Mervin fashion, less
about diversifying the company or quarterly sales
reports, and more to do with something a little
more down-to-earth.
“We got into skiing ’cause we’ve got friends at
Mount Baker who ski,” says Saari. “And we always
promised them we’d build them skis. It took us, like,
10 years, but we finally got around to doing it.
“Plus, it was one of our childhood dreams to make
skis. It felt like a dream I wanted 20 years ago. But
when we finally arrived at it, it felt like I didn’t really
want it anymore. But it’s still fun to make them. I look
at the ski and flex them and theorize about them.
And seeing people’s faces light up, like our buddy’s,
Tory Bland, when we get to make him skis. It’s the
same joy you get when you make someone a nice
snowboard.That’s part of it, I guess,” he says, seem-
ingly oblivious to the scope of the brand he’s helped
create. “Mostly, it’s just to please our friends.”
“We definitely had some times where it felt like we
were out on that environmental limb and nobody
cared. Some people did, but sometimes the people
who mattered didn’t.” —Pete Saari
BANANAS AND MAGNE-TRACTION, OH MY!
WHENTHINGS GO SO RIGHT, YOUWANTTO LIE ABOUTIT
DIVERSIFICATION INTO (NOT SO) NEW MARKETS
THE SWEETIRONYOF DREAMS REALIZED
This is the first thing a visitor sees upon arriving at Mervin.

5. 166 167
Tombs of articles exist today dedicated to breaking down
the business of being green. You can’t buy much today
without being struck by an environmental message. But it
hasn’t always been this way. No that long ago, Mervin wasn’t
only struggling to get its environmental message out to
consumers, it was also fighting to create an environmen-
tally friendly factory.
Mervin uses fast-growing, sustainably harvested trees
for its wood cores, choosing to work with FSC Pure Certi-
fied suppliers whenever possible.The company also uses a
proprietary, water-based graphic printing process, allowing
the company to recycle all of its scrap plastics.
“That adds up to be tons of plastic a month,” says Nelson.
“Right now, our plastics go onto a commodities market
locally, but we’re trying to close the loop on that recycling.
We’re going to be bailing that plastic into dense bails that
weigh about 1,400 pounds a piece to send back to our
plastic supplier, so the scrap material we cut out as base
material will then get ground up, recycled and come back to
us as sidewall material.
“We also do a Bio Bean plastic top sheet on some of our
boards,” he continues. “It’s a topsheet derived from castor
bean oil, so it’s a non-food-based renewable. And we’re
looking into doing a polyethylene base material that’s made
from sugar cane, but we’re just in the testing stages now.
And all the epoxy resins that we use are super lowVOC
(volatile organic compounds). You smell that when you come
into the factory—or don’t smell it, I should say.”
Saari thinks his upbringing has a lot to do with the deci-
sion to keep it green. “Mike’s dad was really into boats, and
he had traveled all over Canada and the inside passage,” he
says. “So he was out in nature all the time. And my dad was a
climber and a hiker, so I’ve been dragged all over the moun-
tains and grew up going to the beaches here. So I always had
the outdoors and environment in mind.
“We kind of came of age in the ’70s, during the first en-
vironmental pushes.There was the gas crisis, and the first
round of solar power, and the first round of wind power” he
continues. “There were some hippy times in the late ’60s
when we were really young, and I think that kind of set the
tone for part of our environmental spin on things.”
But it wasn’t all patchouli fumes driving the green initia-
tive; self-preservation also played a role.
“Mike and I built surfboards,” says Saari. “And building
surfboards is a toxic process if you use polyesters.We’d
both had some bad experiences with chemicals, so when it
came to building snowboards, we knew we were going to
be doing it every day, and we were going to have to put a lot
of time and energy into it.We just knew we didn’t want an
unhealthy environment.
“But as it went on, we had to kind of fight to have an
environmental factory,” he says. “In the ’80s, it was kind of
looked at as ridiculous. We’d say, ‘Hey, we used renewable
woods,’ or ‘Hey, we used non-toxic resin,’ or whatever it was,
and nobody cared. And to the people that were helping us
financially, a lot of times it didn’t really matter,” he explains.
“These days, it matters, people do care. But we definitely
had some times where it felt like we were out on that
environmental limb and nobody cared. Some people did, but
sometimes the people who mattered didn’t.
“We grew up in the era of Love Canal and all those big
toxic spills,” Saari continues. “And we wanted to do every-
thing we could to stay away from that sort of thing. But
mostly, it was to have a healthy environment for our crew.
I guess, we always wanted to build boards the way you’d
dreamed they might be built, even though a lot of times
that’s unrealistic,” he says. “But then, we’ve always been a
little unrealistic.”
In 1997, years before consolidation of brands was
commonplace in the action sports industry, Quiksil-
ver acquired Mervin Manufacturing for approxi-
mately $4.4 million, and assumed nearly $3 million
in bank debt.What few people know is the merger
wasn’t the familiar big-shark-gobbles-up-small-fish
story we’ve grown accustomed to.
“When we started working with Quik in ’97, a lot
of people assumed that Quiksilver came to us,” says
Olson. “I mean, that’s fairly common nowadays: big
company comes to a small company and says, ‘Hey,
we’d like to buy you.’ But that’s not how it happened
at all—we came to them.
“Peter and I luckily foresaw the crash of the snow-
board industry in the later ’90s,” Olson says. “There
were over 400 brands in North America, snowboard
brands claiming to make boards, which meant most
of them outsourced their boards already. And we
knew there was going to be a crash. Other brands
were kind of in denial.They’d talk about growth,
growth, growth, but we knew it wasn’t happening.
“We had zero financing,” admits Olson. “Our
financial backing was all through bank loans.We
had three bank loans with no collateral.We didn’t
have a rich uncle to sign on it.The banks used our
inventory as collateral, so if we ever made one
mistake, we were done.”
At the time, U.S. Bank was keen to cash in on
the fledgling snowboard industry, even using adverts
depicting a skier jumping from a cliff with the
slogan, “This takes guts, but do you have enough
guts to start a business?”
“I think Morrow, Ride, Sims—we all used U.S.
Bank,” says Olson. “They were really pushing to
help finance the snowboard industry. But of the
four brands banking at U.S. Bank, we were the only
one that really didn’t have any collateral. And so
when we saw the crash coming, we knew we were
going to be on thin ice.”
Mervin had been keeping itself operational in
the off-season by producing snowboards for
brands like Luxury out of Canada and Hazmat out of
California. But as the market started getting tight,
these brands were running out of money. Many were
selling boards to Japan when the yen was strong,
and as Japan started to come on hard times,
Mervin’s OEM business began to dry up.
“That’s when we called Quik,” says Olson.
“We used to do Christmas exchanges with them.
They gave us clothing and we gave them snow-
boards. So we cold-called them. It was definitely
scary. At the time, they were about a 100 million-
dollar company, which blew my mind. I couldn’t even
believe we were talking to that big of a company,
but it was the best thing we ever did—and I wouldn’t
change a thing.”
“Theircultureisdefinitelydifferentthanours, and
we’vehadtoadapt,”saysSaari.“Butthat’spartof
businessandpartofgrowingup;youhavetoadapt.
They’vegottheirsystem,we’vegotours.Wewantto
preservewhatmakesusworkandstillgrowandbe
abletoworkwiththem.Soit’sjustanextrachallenge.
“But no matter how challenging it is to work
with Quik,” he continues, “it’s still 10 times better
than working with a bank or being an independent,
because we’ve done it both ways.”
“The beauty with working with Quiksilver is they
let us run our own business,” explains Olson. “They let
us do what we want, and they’ll help us when we ask
for help. In all reality, though, we’re still fairly autono-
mous and run the business as we always have, but
we can sleep a little better at night knowing that we
don’t have to go back to the bank three times a year
to keep discussing our loans.
“We all have the same goals, really,” Olson says.
“The guys at the top of Quik are still in love with
standing sideways on any type of board. [Quiksilver
CEO] Bob McKnight loves to snowboard, loves to
surf; he’s passionate about it. And when we get
together, to be honest, that’s what we talk about.”
“Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve
never been motivated by money at all.
I’m motivated because I want to ride
the boards—the money’s kind of worth-
less if you can’t.” —Mike Olson
THE UNITED BANK OF QUIKSILVER
NOTYOURTYPICAL CORPORATETAKEOVER
IT AIN’T EASY BEING GREEN
OR BEING A DECADE AHEAD OF A MOVEMENT
Mervin has become a leader in envi-
ronmental stewardship, using eco-
friendly materials and implementing
extensive recycling programs.

6. 168 169
A strange thing can happen when a company sees
massive, sudden growth. Once there’s been a taste
of the sweet fruits of success, it can be tempting
to pluck the orchard dry. But Olson and Saari have
resisted the urge to expand outside their means, and
Mervin remains relatively humble in that regard.
“A lot of brands, it seems like they’re motivated
by sales, sales, sales,” Olson says. “What do we have
to do to get more sales?What product lines do we
have to venture into?We’ve never really been that
way. Unless we have a better idea, we don’t want to
venture into ‘me-too products.’We work the opposite
end,” he explains. “We go out there and innovate, and
then hopefully the market likes it.”
Saari admits sales sometimes take second seat,
but it’s always lingering in the back of his mind.
“We’re doing this because we really want to
play—more than even build boards. But it’s a
competitive market out there, and a big part of what
fuels us is neither Mike nor I grew up with money,” he
says. “We were going to have to make our own way in
this world. I mean, we weren’t destitute, but we were
like anybody coming out of school in the ’80s.The
economy sucked and there were no job prospects.
So part of the deal for us was a bit of desperation.”
“Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve never been
motivated by money,” Olson says. “I’m motivated
because I want to ride the boards—the money’s kind
of worthless if you can’t. It’s why I get so excited I can
barely sleep at night. I still lay awake at night and get
up early because I can’t believe we get to make and
ride these boards.”
“I think in a lot of ways I feel like I’m still living my
dream,” says Saari. “And the way it unfolded—start-
ing with surfing inWashington when there were no
surfers and we got to create our own surf culture
and find our own surf spots, and then snowboarding
unveiled itself at the time, and we got to build our
own boards and be a pioneer of a sport—that’s a
rare thing. And to get to watch all that, and meet all
the people, the great riders that have come up—I
don’t really think about it that often, but I do think I
have got to live a lot of my dreams.”
“I think part of our magic is that both Peter and
I are both incredibly passionate about surfing,
snowboarding and skating,” Olson says. “And because
both of us still feel like we’re little kids.We don’t feel
like ‘Oh, our business is mature enough now, let’s
just let someone else handle it. I don’t really feel like
anything’s changed—I still feel like we’ve got to
grind it out every day—I don’t feel any different
than I did in 1982, to be honest.”
“I guess both of us started down low enough in
the world,” he continues. “When I went to high school,
I was in the free lunch program, so I’ve never forgot-
ten that. I’m still a little bit paranoid that this could
all disappear someday, and I won’t have access to
any snowboard or any surfboard I want to go out
and ride,” Olson says, rummaging through a box in
the corner of his office, a small cluttered room wall-
papered with yellowing snowboard posters, racks
of patched up surfboards and momentos
from different eras of a truly fascinating life.
Whatever he’s looking for, he doesn’t find it.
“Whichiswhy nowIgottago fixthatresin
dispenser,”hestartsforthedoor.“Any othercompany
wouldhavesomeoneelsefixthatresindispenser;it’s,
like, oneofthegnarliestjobsinthewholebusiness.”
“We have a big kitchen here where we can cook up
snowboards. And we’ve developed a culture in the
shop, where if someone gets an idea, it doesn’t get
shut down.” —Pete Saari
There’s and old saying about pornography: It’s hard to de-
fine, but you know it when you see it.The same can be said
of Mervin’s unique approach to advertising. Part tribute
to DIYzine culture, partTechnicolor nightmare, the non-
sequacious messages and bizarre images seemed to have
no place in the tech-obsessed and streamlined world of
snowboard advertising. But Mervin’s sense of what strikes
a chord with consumers proved once again the boys from
the Northwest, whether they knew it or not, were more in
tune with their customer than many gave them credit for.
“Our marketing is definitely a little different than most
other brands,” says Olson. “And to be honest, in the past
I wouldn’t have completely understood why. But we just
didn’t know,” he admits. “We didn’t know that you could
outsource marketing. Other brands, a lot of them started
with a big pile of money, so they’d hire a big marketing
agency to do ads and so forth.We didn’t have any
money, we had to do it ourselves.”
“The first ad we ever ran,” he continues. “I just went to
the printing shop, back when they’d lay transparency
over transparency. I just stood there and came up with
an ad over a guy’s shoulder.”
“If we’ve got that mom-and-pop vibe, it’s because
Mike and I have always done everything ourselves,” says
Saari. “First of all, we couldn’t afford to have anyone else
do anything for us. And then we always enjoyed every
aspect of snowboard building: making ads, building
boards, going out and riding them.
“While you’re building a board, your mind kind of drifts
to what the ad is going to look like,” he continues. “Or while
you’re riding, you’re thinking of it, so one thing fuels the
other. And once you know that, when you do come up with
an ad, that you can actually run it, you start thinking of that
stuff more and you start writing it down and scribbling
ideas and you get inspired.
“Both of us grew up reading surf and skate mags,”
Saari continues. “And we know what used to pull on us
and inspire us and make us want things. We’ve always had
a healthy skepticism towards marketing. We’ve always
kind of made fun of ourselves and the whole process of it.
“We do the ads in part to sell a product, but mostly
just to please ourselves and maybe make a rider happy,
or make ourselves laugh,” he says. “And hopefully, if we
laugh, someone else laughs.”
“I’ve heard it said before that some of our ads are a
little too light-hearted, or maybe too fun, so sometimes
the message of our technology is lost,” admits Olson (who
at one point hired the same designer who’d created some
of the first controversial ads forWorld Industries). “I used
to hear that more in the 1990s, when we were going over
the top on some ads, but we also had technology that
maybe people weren’t learning about.
“I used to have reps that would go, ‘Come on, can’t we
just have a technical ad?’ And for us, that just wasn’t fun,”
Olson says. “But now, I think our technology message, most
if it’s getting out there. However, once again, some of our
environmental products, we’ve made up whacky names,
and I think some people think it’s a joke.
“I’ve had people come up to me at trade shows and go,
‘You guys are so funny. You come up with all these fake
things in your boards.’The stories sounded too spectacular,”
Olson says. “But we really are using vegetable products
in our topsheets. But we had given it so many whacky
names over the years, nobody cared.
“But I think if people really digest what we’re doing—
we have fun and pick a whacky name—but really, there’s
a lot of mojo with what we’re trying to describe. But we’re
not ever going to drop having fun with it.”
IF IT LOOKS MOM-AND-POP, IT’S BECAUSE WE DID IT OURSELVES
WHEN A BRAND’S IMAGE IS ACTUALLYBASED ON ITS REALITIES
A PINCH OF PARANOIA, A DOSE OF DESPERATION
THE INGREDIENTSTO SUCCEED AND MAKETIME STAND STILL
Three shifts of locally hired snowboarders and
skiers hand craft boards nearly 24 hours a day.