Snowboards made in Boston
There’s still no snow, but with cooling temps and colored leaves, the six guys of Bean Snowboards are working hard and getting stoked for the winter.
Bean Snowboards creates hand-made snowboards out of a garage in Brighton. This year, the models feature a new line of graphics done by local artists Steve Holding (Metalwing) and Ryan Lombardy (Enamel Kingdom).
Their motto: “Buy local, shred local.”
A well-suited saying for a group of guys passionate about snowboarding: three mechanical engineers from Northeastern, a designer, a marketing professional, a photographer, and team rider Eugene Stancato, from Dorchester.
This will be their fourth year selling boards, and sixth year making them. The creative board designs this year will not disappoint even the pickiest of customers.
“Every board we put out there is like one of our children,” said Patrick Leary, 29, brand manager for Bean. “If one of our boards malfunctions, we drive to your house with another board in the truck.”
Right now, Bean is building boards almost daily to get ready for the upcoming season. Each board costs $325, about the same as mass-produced snowboards.
Bean has come a long way from its modest beginnings. The three friends and engineers, Brian Callan, 29, Collin Murray, 29, and Mike McGraw, 29, started out in an Allston basement woodshop. They went online to skibuilders.com for a basic tutorial on how to build a snowboard. They also cut designer Scott Petrichko’s brothers snowboard in half for some hands-on research.
“The first year, we just wanted to see if we could make a snowboard at all,” McGraw said. “A lot of it is trial an error.”
They described the board like a sandwich. Layers of polyethylene, fiberglass and a wood core are glued together with epoxy. They use an I-beam press to bind it all together.
Bean doesn’t just make the snowboards here; all the materials are locally sourced as well. They order all the wood cores from a custom woodworker in Chicopee.
Great dedication goes into each board. The guys often spend more than 30 hours a week making the boards during the fall and winter– on top of their real jobs. That’s right, they each have “real jobs” as well. McGraw and Murray develop medical devices, Callan engineers refrigeration systems (but wants to specialize in being shot from a canon), Petrichko is the art director at Mullen, and Leary does ground operations for JetBlue.
The Bean crew said they accept that they will suffer goofy conversations, and perhaps, become closer to one another than they’d ever expect from time to time working under sheer exhaustion.
“It just gets ridiculous and the conversations just get weird and ridiculous at those hours,” said Warren Huffman, a recent Boston University graduate now working with Bean.
“I call it a glorified hobby,” Leary said. “Snowboarding is all of our lifestyles, and the goal is to make snowboards and get the community riding them as a full time job.”
Every year they get boards out on the slopes and take feedback from their riders. The goal is to continue refining the design until the boards are perfect. This year, Bean is working on a board with no plastics in it whatsoever, just that good ol’ bamboo.
The boards are sold both online and at Wicked Sharp, a retail store in West Roxbury.
“If you buy one of our boards, it’s like you become one of our friends,” Leary said.
Throughout the fall, the Bean crew checked in at various snowboard video premieres around New England to hang out with like-minded individuals and to spread the word about Bean.
“East Coast board culture is the best in the world,” Leary said. “It’s steeped in tradition and has a large hand in snowboard history.”
Out East, a short season is known for its icy conditions and temps that regularly fall below 0° F. “It’s more about riding with my bros, not getting out 100 days every year,” said photographer Joey Marrone.
Bean sponsors shares that same passion and commitment with the community. They sponsor “rail jams” across the city, where they shovel truckloads of ice shavings on a ramp so kids across the state can ride before the season actually arrives.
They officially unveiled their new boards for the season at the Seaport Snow Expo, and they hope to sell them all. And as a final note, the guys at Bean love high-fives.
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