After hanging up his World Cup bibs and hard boots, he remained with Burton, moving into the R&D side at the brand’s European base in Innsbruck, Austria. While he stresses that they were good years, it wasn’t long before he developed an itch that the day job couldn’t scratch.

“When you design a snowboard for a big brand, the approach is completely different,” he explains from his home in Germany. “You need to cater to a very big clientele, and you can’t make it edgy. If it has too much power, if it’s too responsive, people won’t ride it. But for me, I always wanted to make boards with character.”

He parted ways with the big B in 2002, and the inevitable happened two years later when he started Amplid. Now he was calling the shots, with a focus on lighter and more responsive decks with fast bases. But it wasn’t just about upping the quality; in his eyes, the entire industry had got itself stuck in a cul-de-sac.

“I always wanted to make boards with character”

“In the 90’s everything was about urban riding. When you opened up a snowboard magazine, you only saw people on a rail in town, or in the air. Just doing a turn in powder was considered kind of lame, and doing a carve on corduroy was culturally not acceptable. But if you ask ten of your friends, ‘what’s your wet dream when they think about snowboarding’, it’s all about making a turn in powder. Maybe one out of ten dreams about doing a railslide and wakes up with a hard-on…”

He was proven right in due course, when eventually the industry as a whole fell back in love with the art of turning. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect for Peter’s fledgling brand. “This is where we were coming from, and this is what we make boards for.”

The new thirst for innovative freeride shapes has played in Amplid’s favour, but any small company still has a fight on its hands to cut through the infernal noise of Insta-posts. The era of the Forum 8 may be long gone, but a stacked team is still one way to get noticed. Despite Amplid’s substance-over-style approach, Peter’s not naive to the challenges of 21st-century marketing.

As much as Peter values the anecdotal evidence of riders whose opinions he trusts, he’s got more than that to back it up. “We can measure in a laboratory. We can measure how quickly it stabilises, the height of the aperture, the wavelength, and the time that takes to stop. And it’s a huge difference.” If anyone still needs convincing, one of snowboarding’s biggest players has stepped in to help. Peter used to compete against Nitro founder Tommy Delgado decades ago, and as such the two brands have a pretty chummy relationship. For 2021/22, Nitro has licensed the Antiphase technology for a couple of its boards, and produced a simple side-by-side demonstration tool that shows the difference that Antiphase makes when compared to a standard laminate. Look out for it in snowboard shops this winter.

“It derives from a just simple desire. If you have a better snowboard, your day will be better, you will be happier”

That’ll definitely help the cause, but Peter’s preference will always be for snowboarders to feel it for themselves on the mountain. “I really dig it when I go ride with people and we swap boards and they start to say, ‘fuck, this is crazy, it’s much better than mine!’” That’s the driving force behind all of this science-ing. “It derives from a just simple desire. If you have a better snowboard, your day will be better, you will be happier.”

One problem with taking the tech side so seriously is translating that information to the layman. Simply telling potential customers that ‘it makes the snowboard better’ isn’t enough obviously, but there’s a real danger in getting bogged down in the details. “You know, ‘ze German engineering!’”, hoots Peter, turning his Bavarian accent all the way up to elf. “You don’t want to come across like fucking BMW.”

Fortunately for him, there’s now a widely-understood shorthand available for Antiphase’s benefits – noise-cancelling headphones. Even if they don’t own a set themselves, most people know what they are, and – in broad strokes, at least – how they work. “You explain that Antiphase is vibration dampening, and that it’s similar to what headphones from Bose are doing, right?”

Another antidote for the tech talk is a healthy lack of pretension when it comes to slapping a name of the finished product. Spray Tray, Snomellier, Surfari, and of course, Morning Glory – the names of most Amplid boards feel like they were conjured up not in a lab, but in a pub. “We try to balance out the nerdy engineering stuff with a certain humour,” explains Peter. “It’s sometimes not so easy when we don’t speak English as our mother tongue, but we try to be very human with the way we talk.”

That authenticity, sorely lacking from much of modern marketing, has played a big part in earning Amplid its reputation – and with splitboarding enjoying new heights of popularity, it’s a good time to be a tech-first brand that can justify every feature in the product without getting a slap on the wrist from Ofcom.

Take, for example, the brand’s ‘Stratospheric’ topsheet, which prevents snow from sticking to the splitboards and making it heavier on the ascent. Borrowing tried-and-tested technology used to keep the greenhouses of Sicily and Morocco cool enough to grow tomatoes under an unforgiving sun, Stratospheric gets results without the need for environmentally damaging additives. “You can treat the topsheet with silicon or oil, but it’s all gonna end up in the river – and in the end, our coffee. So we found an optical way.”

“That authenticity, sorely lacking from much of modern marketing, has played a big part in earning Amplid its reputation”

This eco-friendly approach confirms Peter’s claim that he’s listening to customers – but again, making good boards remains the priority. One of his recent prototypes saw 50% of the fibreglass replaced with a sugarcane weave, with mixed results. “It works really well, but bonding is a nightmare – so far we haven’t found out the right treatment to work with an environmentally-friendly epoxy. Eco is nice, but it’s got to work, right?”

So the quest for perfection continues, but it’s one he’s happy to be on. Contrary to what your feed might be telling you, there are no easy solutions, and progress is only possible when people like Peter put in the hard yards. The influencer game may be rotten, but there’s a lot of value in being influenced – provided you’re looking in the right places, and with a sense of purpose. For Peter Bauer and Amplid, it’s something that ironically sails dangerously close to a sunset-background inspirational Instagram caption:

“At the end, a good snowboard is happiness.”

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For more info, check out Amplid’s website.

For more on Instagram, follow Peter Bauer and Amplid.