"Officially I'm still taking a year off before going to college, mom!" - Alex Warburton

Odds are, at some point, you have ridden a snowboard product that Alex Warburton had a hand in designing, developing or producing. After almost three decades in the snowboard game, half of which spent on the production side of things, you could easily write everything this guy doesn't know about the shred world on the back of your season's pass, and he isn't done yet.

It all started in the fall of 1983 when he mail ordered a Burton Backhill to his childhood home in Peterborough, Ontario. That's right, '83. The following winter he popped his chairlift cherry in Vermont and it was official, he was hooked. In 1986 high school let out for good and he made the move to Sunshine Village, near Banff, Alberta, so he could ride everyday and add 10 weeks to his season. He spent two years at Sunshine and during this tenure met the infamous Ken Achenbach and the rest of the Barfoot crew. This is when Alex got his first taste of being a sponsored snowboarder and started traveling to contests with Ken. They outgrew Banff and moved on to the promise-land, Whistler, BC, in 1988. There were a grand total of six snowboarders living in Whistler at the time and they were all shacked up in the same house. At about this time Alex signed on with Burton and started chasing the contest circuit globally with the likes of (Jeff) Brushie, (Mike) Jacoby, Noah Brandon, Jimi Scott and the Craig Kelly.

After a few years, all the travel started to get to Alex, "I got disillusioned chasing the contests," he remembers, "I really missed riding with friends back in Whistler on powder days." So he shifted gears and started filming back in Whistler before there were really any snowboard videos being made. His resume includes trips and films with iconic skiers like Trevor Peterson and Eric Pehota.

At this point Morrow Snowboards really supported his move from contests to filming and he spent the next six years on their program. From there, after getting to know the Morrow brothers, Matt and Neil, Alex moved to Salem, Oregon where he started his tutelage in production. He got a crash course in the industry and was immediately involved with prototype production, the Masters Series, molds for bindings and also began traveling to China to work on one of the first step-in binding projects.

I wanted to find out what makes Alex tick and where his drive to develop and evolve snowboard products came from, to how he ended up where he is today, a highly sought after production consultant and designer.

Were you the type of kid that was always building models and taking things apart to see how they worked? Were you always curious about production when it came to snowboarding?
Yeah, totally! I always had a sketchbook and was always sketching and doodling. My dad was an engineer and he taught me to work on my motocross bikes; I was always building ramps and stuff in the yard. We were pretty isolated in the outskirts of Peterborough, and by isolated I mean we were a million miles away from southern California and where everything cool was, so if you needed something cool, you had to build it. When I was a rider at Morrow, the product was being made there in Salem, Oregon, allowing me a direct line of communication to bitch and complain about stuff. When I finally finished riding they said, "you've been complaining for how many years now, so get in here and fix it."

Was there a transition over time where you were both a rider and production guy, or did it happen pretty quickly?
I took a one-year hiatus from riding. I got pretty spooked - I think it was 1997, maybe '96. I was riding with Brian Savard and one of the most knowledgeable guides in Whistler, who was showing us around. Through a bit of a freak accident a shear slab broke off and our guide tumbled down and died right in front of us. That was a heavy situation to have. Then in that same winter Matt Goodwill got trapped in a crevasse in Alaska and I was riding with him that trip. I also had a product malfunction and tumbled down a chute in Haines, Alaska, so by the end of that winter I was pretty spooked. I didn't make a lot of money off snowboarding. I was banging nails in the summer so I viewed it as a life-threatening job that paid shitty (laughing). I ended up saving up a bunch of money and took the winter off to surf in Costa Rica and Panama for four months. I mean, the only reason I started snowboarding anyway was so I could get closer to the ocean and eventually surf. When I came back I reconnected with Morrow. I had it in my head for a bit to get back into snowboarding professionally, but instead Neil stepped in and said, "hey, why don't you come in and work on product, you'll still get to ride." It was great, I got paid more to design and ride product and I never had to land a thing (laughing).

So what happened next?
K2 bought up Morrow and basically kept Rob on board for a few years as a mascot of sorts and pretty much everybody got canned. I was a contractor so I was one of the first to go. I cruised around back in BC a little bit, connected with the Forum guys and started getting myself involved with product, kind of on the same level as I was doing with Morrow, developing ideas and working with their product guys. I started spending more and more time there and over the course of 4 or 5 years I ended up as the Board and Binding Product Manager. For 3 or 4 years straight I was designing all the boards, helping with board graphics, all the industrial design, line strategy for the bindings. I was working about 60 hours a week and loving it. I was single, living in California and surfing on the weekends - it was good, it was fun!

(keep reading for more of what successes Alex has been a part of)