Ride Shadowban 2023/24
An in-depth review of the Ride Shadowban snowboard for 2023-2024 - selected by our test team for the 'Whitelines 100' Best Snowboard Gear Awards
Hailing from the Western shores of the USA, Ride Snowboards was initially a project for Roger Madison to keep him busy in the winter when the sales of his indoor tanning machines dropped. He teamed up with James Salter who had headed up Kemper snowboards till a few years previous with another Ride founder – Tim Pogue.
They launched their new brand at the SIA show in 1993 with a mini-ramp and a couple of hundred litres of beer, and needless to say their order books were full from then…
For the 1994 season the Ride team decided to launch their own apparel brand – Cappel, making them an up-and-coming triple threat in the snowboard market. They later absorbed this into their own clothing line, but to this day have a Cappel range in their outerwear.
Going from strength to strength like some sort of snowboard Tarzan, they purchased a snowboard production factory in 1995 to bring the company entirely in-house. They could afford to splash out bearing in mind they had floated themselves on the stock market the year before. In a matter of months their shares went from $2 to $35, but the boom couldn’t last…
The crunch in the snowboard market hit in the late 90’s and it took Ride a while to recover, but they remain a heavyweight on the scene to this day. With a diverse team from whirling dervish Yuki Kadono to backcountry slayer Jake Baluvelt, they’ll stand the test of time for years to come.
