Vroom Vroom Toon Room

“Snowboarding has given me so much. I want the Toon Room to serve as a way to give back to the community through tuning workshops and the Vroom Vroom Gear Closet. To educate, empower, mentor, motivate and elevate those that have stumbled into my world and don’t have the resources that I had when I first started”

Vroom Vroom Toon Room is, quite literally, a vehicle for me to reconnect with Snowboarding Community, and serve as a conduit to welcome into that community all of the new participants within snow sports that have joined our ranks since Covid hit us in 2020. As a lifelong snowboarder, and twenty-five year veteran of the Snowboarding Industry, I have always found the most joy in two things: 1.) being the first person that a new snowboarder comes in contact with during their exploration of becoming a snowboarder and 2.) tuning snowboards…. My path has been a wild and eccentric ride rife with peril, adventure, achievement and defeat. I began my journey as a snowboard instructor in Stowe, VT. I wanted nothing more than to work at one fo the many shops on Stowe’s (then) legendary Mountain Road. Misty Mountain, Cherry Bone, The Snowboard Attic… Anyone one would do, and not a single one of them would give sixteen year old me the time of day. Can’t blame ‘em, I was (still am!?) a total kook. But that experience is a formative one that drives my quest for eliminating gate keeping within snowboarding, and breaking down the many barriers to entry that exist today.

Three year’s instructing, one of which I spent in Crested Butte, CO, led me home to Vermont where I worked in the Burton Flagship store on 80 Industrial pkwy in Burlington, VT. I met so many amazing people there in those days, many of them have risen to positions of influence within snowboarding, many others fell to the swinging sword of Burton’s disappointing “rise to power.” Ian Singleton was one such person who became one of the most important people in my life. He saw something in me, a young snowboarder hungry to dive deeper into the community and become an integral part of snowboarding. He saw my drive, my ambition and the joy that snowboarding brought to me and he helped unlock my potential by bringing me on as his assistant manager at Darkside Snowboards, where we worked together to open it’s third location in Stowe in 2005. During those years I also worked at Mount Mansfield Snowboard Club as a coach and mentor, competed in the local East Coast competition circuit winning several, but never fulfilling my dream of becoming a professional snowboarder.

Darkside continues to serve Vermont, and the snowboarding community at large, as the oldest family owned Snowboard shop in North America. They maintain their position as a leader in community engagement and experiential, specialty, snowboard retail. After nine-years at Darkside, taking over as store manager and buyer from 2010 to 2014, I left Vermont to move Seattle to work for C3 (CAPiTA Snowboards, Union Binding Company and Coal Headwear) as their “first?” customer service representative alongside my (now) close friend Dallas. During my eight year tenure I filled every role imaginable from customer service, customer service manager, warranty manager, shipping and receiving, territory manager and finally resigning in 2022 as the North American sales manager, responsible for half of total sales in the USA and Canada. Those eight years were incredibly exciting. We blew through so many glass ceilings with no idea how important these brands would eventually become. We knew it in our hearts, but the climb was not easy and there were many challenges to overcome, some that, in the moment, seemed as if they could have very well brought our successes to a screeching halt.

That experience taught me a great deal. Most importantly, it reminded me that I never got into the snowboarding industry because it was a cool place to work. I got into it because I was a poor kid from Hardwick, VT who found his way into snowboarding by some kind of miracle, and couldn’t afford it unless it came as a perk of the job. I wasn’t meant to serve the commodification of snowboarding. I was meant to serve the community, to be a mentor for the many who have found snowboarding but don’t have anyone to invite them into our world and teach them what it means to be a snowboarder, a renegade, and how to become a part of the community to find a sense of belonging and purpose. I was meant to be the invitation for those that don’t share the privilege that I had to be invited into the snowboarding community through a legacy snowboard shop. Welcome to the Party!