History you can sit on...
The 1st board was 14 layers of maple veneer, laminated with epoxy. I rode it twice, although it started to delaminate the first day on it. The second day was an epic day of powder at Winter Park, which involved skipping school and a huge knot on my head from not ducking low enough while going under a tree branch.

The 4th board was 3 layers of 1/8in Luann plywood with 3/4oz chop strand fiberglass between each layer. This board was put together with polyester resin rather than epoxy. It’s a less expensive substitute that worked well if the board wasn’t going to be ridden a lot. This board was ridden approximately 15 days.

The shapes of these boards were derived from my Burton Elite 150. I combined its shape with a turned up tail and slightly further forward stance. At the time I really wasn’t too concerned with shape. I just wanted a plank I could slide down the mountain on.

Donek Snowboards will hit 20 years of board building this year. Looking back at where we began and where we are today is an interesting trip down memory lane. I started the company while still in high school. I even wrote a business plan as a social studies project that involved manufacturing and selling snowboards directly to the end user. I built the first boards in my parent’s basement. The bench you see above is made from the 1st and 4th boards I built. #2 and #3 both broke.

Things progressed from there as I became more skilled I played with increasingly complex constructions and shapes. While studying mechanical engineering at CU Boulder, I was always heading home to work in mom and dad’s basement and experiment with new ideas and constructions based on my studies. I played with building skateboards for a couple years and even sold them through some local shops.

Upon Graduating college in 1993 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and multiple graduate level courses in composites, design, and mathematical modeling, I went to work for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I continued building boards and started looking for a job with another manufacturer. Frustration with the old boys club mentality in the rest of the industry led me to finally incorporating Donek Snowboards and pursuing my first production projects in 1995.

Working in an oversized one car garage, I began building boards and offering them online. Sales were slow, so I produced a big run of boards for a Rockford Fosgate promotion. I also took on production of some monoskis.

In 1997, Jenifer and I got married and we bought our first house in Aurora. One of the primary concerns was shop space. We got a place with a 2 car garage and a 500 square foot unfinished basement. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven with all that space to build boards.

By 2000 I felt I was ready to go it on my own and I stopped producing monoskis as a means of filling in the financial gaps. Things went well and Jenifer and I had begun getting restless in what appeared to be a rapidly shrinking shop space. We decided it was time to move the business into a bigger space, but commercial space was simply too expensive.

Having grown up on a farm in eastern Colorado, Jenifer wanted to return to a small town life. I had never really fallen in love with the city, so in 2001 we found some land east of Denver that was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The property had a house and a very poorly built barn. Over the course of the first summer I pretty much tore down the barn and put it back up properly, adding a concrete floor and electricity. We put all our finishing and core production in the barn and left the pressing and cnc equipment in the basement of the house. Between the two spaces, we had graduated to slightly more than 3000 square feet of space.

In late September of 2002 there was a fire in the barn, which completely destroyed the building and all the equipment. Knocked down, but not out, I converted a structure that had been used as a car port into a temporary shop and future garage, to fill our core production and finishing needs for the 2002/2003 season. With the help of some really good neighbors and friends from the bagpipe band I played in, we set up this new space and had things back on track in less than 6 weeks. We saw our first Olympic athlete make the team in 2002, but sadly never saw him race on TV.

In the summer of 2003, we began construction on a new 5000 square foot building. We moved all the equipment into this building in the fall. It has been the home for our production ever since.

We were sponsoring 4 athletes on the US national team by the 2006 Olympics. We invested a lot of money in developing some new ideas in board construction the season before. One of the results of this research is what we call our Olympic construction. This large investment and a rather lack luster result caused us to re-examining our sponsorship programs for athletes and led us to an arrangement with coach Sean McCarran at Copper mountain. This arrangement has led to greater cooperation and communication between board builder, coach and athlete; the people most important to product development. We feel we are moving in a much more informed direction as a result.

The 2007/08 season will see some new shapes and constructions from us.

Donek pioneered the use of CNC (Computer Numerical Control) equipment in board production. This equipment enables us to move from concept to prototype in about 6 hours rather than the 2 weeks most manufacturers require. Our integration of CNC equipment also makes it possible for us to produce custom boards completely tailored to individual riders at reasonable prices.

An ancillary benefit of our rapid development capabilities is that our understanding and implementation of new snowboard technology grows much more quickly than other companies' advancement. We're driven to improve our designs and processes, so we've invested in the technology that helps to make it possible.

People often ask where the name Donek came from. When we began making boards in 1987, a friend was breeding Donek Yugoslavian acrobatic pigeons. These birds dive doing an axial roll and fly faster than a peregrine falcon. Their speed, flight, and freestyle nature made the name Donek an obvious choice.