Making R&D RAD | How Amplid Snowboards Carved Out Their Niche

Perhaps this is what happens when you’ve been working in snowboarding long enough to see trends come and go. Before he founded Amplid, back in 2004, Bauer had a 20-year career as a pro-rider. He first stepped on a board back in 1984, got sponsored by Burton in 1986, and went on to win five European Championships, four World Championships, and an incredible 84 World Cup events.

“It’s funny now, because carving is cool again”

Even as a pro, he resolutely refused to jump on bandwagons. Bauer was a capable freestyle rider with a decent bag of tricks, including a mean method. But although he competed in the halfpipe (slopestyle didn’t exist back then) and became vice world champion in the “combined disciplines” behind Craig Kelly, he started to focus on racing after a few seasons, a discipline that became less and less fashionable as the 90s wore on—and on perfecting his carve. “It’s funny now, because carving is cool again,” Bauer says—whereas back in the day, he remembers other snowboarders using homophobic slurs to describe him and his fellow racers. “Even the verb ‘carving’ was banned,” he says, laughing at the ludicrous lengths the sport’s self-appointed gatekeepers went to. “You couldn’t even say ‘I’m just going to carve some turns,’ it was against snowboarding sharia, you would have been stoned right away.”

Not that any of this stopped him having a long and successful career, or from developing a close working relationship with Jake Burton. Over the years, Bauer became increasingly involved in his sponsor and mentor’s design process, helping him perfect many of the models that defined Burton’s range in the late 90s. When it came time to hang up his boots, he knew he wanted to start his own snowboard company. But as with his riding career however, he knew that he wanted to do things differently.

“The aim was to make a better ride, rather than a louder brand.”

A Material Difference

A quick Snowboard Manufacturing 101: Most snowboards, both then and now, are produced in just a handful of factories around the world. Many of these offer stock materials, shapes and designs, and often, the biggest difference between different companies’ boards are the graphics. The reality is, Bauer says, “Anyone can go to any factory and go, ‘Okay, here are my graphics, I would like to place an order of 100 items per length, for 300 or 400 boards or whatever,’ and then you have your snowboard brand.”

Rather than concentrate on the product itself, companies often spend the bulk of their time and money on brand building. “Without mentioning any names, there’s a lot of brands who chose the route of marketing, of buying world champions, paying a lot of riders, and investing into movie production—but actually, they have a mediocre product,” Bauer explains. “Whereas with Amplid, we chose to invest our main revenue into R&D, into moulds, and into experimenting with new materials”. From the start, he says the aim was “to make a better ride, rather than a louder brand.”

Looking at Amplid’s current line-up of boards, no-one would ever accuse them of being loud. Even at their most colourful, their graphics only feature a few muted pastels. Beneath the understated topsheets, however, there’s a whole lot going on. Take the Centrifugal Collection, for example: three models, the Souly Grail, the Time Machine and the UNW8, designed for high-speed carving both on piste and in powder. “We wanted to make really responsive boards that are a bit easier longitudinally,” Bauer says. Your classic hard-charging board “is super responsive, and stiff, but then after two runs it’s so fatiguing—not just on your thighs but also on your nerves because you’re always trying to, like, not kill this Dutch skier in front of you,” he laughs.”

Thinking outside the box, he experimented with arranging carbon stringers, which traditionally run nose to tail on a snowboard, at a 90 degree angle from edge to edge. “I really like carbon, but I don’t like carbon in the longitudinal axis,” he explains. “This way, when you’re on an edge you feel it. We can benefit a little bit from the torsional rigidity of carbon, but on the longitudinal flexibility you have this easy, glass fibre flex, which you want.” Bauer’s desire to experiment with materials has taken him to some stranger places too. “There are these really nerdy forums on the internet where people discuss the properties of composite. Then there are composite trade shows you can go to,” he says. “Ninety-nine percent of what you see is useless, but then you see something and you think ‘huh, this could work in a snowboard.’”

It was a chance find like this that led to one of Amplid’s most radical design innovations to date: “The Hollow Project,” a board with no wood core whatsoever. “We found this honeycomb material made in Germany,” Bauer says, “and we wanted to see how light we could go with a board. The weight was insane, on the chairlift it felt like you’d dropped your board,” he says. They looked cool too. Bauer holds up his phone torch and shows me how you can see the light through the snowboard. But the flex didn’t feel great at all, so completely hollow boards never made it past the prototype stage.

“R&D is always two steps forward, one step back,” Bauer says. And the trial and error process led to Amplid using the honeycomb material at the nose and tail of lots of their current range. “That’s where it really makes sense, at the tip and tail,” Bauer says. Freestyle boards featuring this “hollow tech” have massively reduced swing weight, which is great for spinning, he says. And hollow tech also features in their best-selling Milligram splitboard—one of the lightest ever produced.

“These days there’s no such thing as a truly bad board … but there are a lot of boring boards.”

Building Boards with Character

Some of this might sound like tinkering for tinkering’s sake, but there’s always a purpose. As board manufacturing has become more standardized over the years, standards have risen. These days there’s no such thing as a truly bad board, Bauer says, but there are a lot of boring boards. And from day one, Amplid’s mission, as he sees it, has been “to build boards with character.”

This even applies to their all-mountain boards. Although many brands don’t like to admit it, any board that’s a jack of all trades must, logically, make compromises. “There are always certain sacrifices,” Bauer explains, “like do you want to compromise on performance in powder, or maybe in the park?” This can result in really boring boards that don’t do anything particularly well. But by accepting the need to compromise, and by “allocating and defining exactly where these compromises are,” Amplid have managed to produce The Singular, an all mountain model that still feels distinctive and fun. “In my opinion, and of course this is completely absent of objectivity, it’s the all mountain board with the least sacrifices,” Bauer says.

If The Singular feels singularly different, their more obviously distinctive models are even more characterful. Take the Kodama, a splitboard built specifically for Japow-style tree lines (it’s name means “tree spirit” in Japanese) which has a stubby swallow tail, a massive spoonlike nose, and only comes in a comparatively short 156cm. Or The Snomelier, made for connoisseurs of high-alpine backcountry lines. The Mood Bender, designed as “the ideal backcountry and sidehit freestyle board,” which blends a twin flex with a tapered shape is another example. 

Of course, Amplid aren’t alone in experimenting with strange shapes. Over the past 15 years, there’s been an explosion in the number of weird and wonderful-looking snowboards on the market. The trend was taken to its logical extreme by the Helgason brothers, who in typically pisstaking style, released a board called the Lobster Nosejob in 2013 which encouraged owners to carve their own shapes out of each end. But Amplid’s shape and design choices are more than cosmetic—they really make a difference to how each board feels and rides.

Precision Tech & Terminology

Bauer says he finds a lot of the chat around shape a bit woolly. “People talk a lot about shaping boards, like they’re surf boards. But it’s a completely different process. Shaping a surfboard is a highly respected craft—it’s a mix of feel and spirit and knowing the surfer you’re shaping for. It’s hands on, you get your hands dirty. Whereas you don’t shape a snowboard. You can lay it up by hand, sure, but it goes in a press.” However romantic it might sound, Bauer says he could never honestly describe himself as a shaper. “I’m a designer and a manufacturer.”

“There are other terminologies that really piss me off too because they’re physically wrong,” he says. It’s now common to talk of short fat snowboards—like Amplid’s Kodama split, for example—as “volume shift” boards, another term lifted from surfing. “But that’s obviously so wrong,” Bauer says. “Volume doesn’t matter in a snowboard—even if you make it five times thicker, you’re not going to float better in powder. It’s all about surface area. So what we should be calling them is ‘surface-shifted’ boards.”

Of course Bauer’s been around long enough to know that marketing often wins out. If surf terms like “volume shift” help shift large volumes of boards, brands will keep using them regardless. “This is maybe also a reason why we’re not huge,” he says. Amplid will never be a mass-market brand, he says, “because we go our own way.” But Bauer is proud that they’ve grown continuously throughout the past 20 years, and their boards inspire fierce loyalty in their fans. And it’s clear that for Bauer, precision matters, in terms of terminology as well as tech. At one stage in our chat I ask whether Amplid’s HQ is on the German or the Austrian side of the border. “Neither, we’re on the Bavarian side,” he says laughing. The comment is meant as a joke, but it’s a revealing one, suggesting not just pride in his fiercely-independent home region, but also his precise engineer’s mindset.

Bavaria is, of course, globally renowned for its precision engineering. BMW, Mercedes, and Audi, all hail from the area. It would be tempting to suggest that Amplid, whose sleek, high-end boards ooze a Vorsprung durch Technik vibe, share some DNA with these automotive giants. But the truth is probably simpler. They’re the result of years of hard graft and focused R&D work, led by a single-minded individual who’s never been swayed by trends. “And this,” Bauer says, “is why our boards look different, and feel different, and ride different.” 
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This winter we reviewed the Amplid Soulmate and awarded it one of the best All-Mountain Snowboards on the market. Check our full review below: