Empire Grown are snowboards grown in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.
The company is just two people, Ben and Zhenya, using Poplar trees grown on their land to build snowboards in small batches every season.
We’ve been working on our ride for two years and after multiple prototypes we want to bring our winning design to life for the 2014/2015 riding season. Check out our current project on kickstarter.
Our very first snowboard started shape as a text message several years ago. Could it be possible that we can build snowboards the way we wanted them to ride? After tons more hours of research, lonely nights in front of AutoCAD, and sore muscles from scratching our heads we finally proved ourselves right.
Now that we knew it could be done, we needed to see how well it could be done.
That summer was spent tweaking angles in AutoCAD, poring over composites, and picking out the wood that would become our snowboard cores. The goal for the next version was to have it be completely ours including a never before seen board shape to create an All Mountain ride.
After a full season of riding we tested eight fabric variations, three different mold types and were fortunate to receive a bunch of feedback from our friends riding in all sorts of different conditions. The winner?
A 17 oz. biaxial fiberglass layered up with an 11 oz. carbon fiber tape for adding reinforcement based on the rider’s specs to maintain the desired feel.
We want to share our love of home grown snowboarding with more people by creating a limited run of 50 snowboards for the upcoming 2014/2015 season. We need your help to be able to do this entirely on our own.
