Wired Snowboards: the East Vancouver factory story
Most snowboard brands have a founding story that fits on a hangtag. Wired has one that needs a whole shop floor.
It starts in the mid-eighties in Richmond, BC, where a teenage Rob Dow got himself into enough trouble that his mother shipped him off to live with his father in Whistler. Dow has called it the best thing that ever happened to him. It's where he saw snowboarding for the first time, and by 1987 he had his own board and a problem: he was good at this. Really good.
The pro years, and the itch that came with them
What followed was a decade as a proper pro. Signature boots with Vans. Pro model boards with Option, the Vancouver brand that was pressing some of the most respected decks of the nineties. And that's where the story turns, because Option didn't just put Dow's name on a topsheet. They let him into the factory.
For most riders a pro model is a graphic and a flex number. For Dow it became an obsession with construction. Cores, sidewalls, layups, what actually makes a board feel a certain way underfoot. He never really lost that, and it's the thread that runs through everything he did afterwards: co-founding Iris Snow, Wildcats, running board development at Endeavor for years. Thirty years in the industry, on every side of it, always with one hand in the press.
Building a factory a few blocks from where it started
Around 2019 Dow decided he needed a change of pace and took the plunge. Wired Snowboards opened on Clark Drive in Vancouver's Strathcona neighbourhood, a short walk from where the old Option factory used to be. That's not a coincidence and it's not nostalgia either. It's a guy going back to the one thing he always wanted more of: total control over how a board gets made.
And that's the actual point of Wired. A small team, their own presses, every shape designed in-house. They can take a new idea and have a physical prototype within 24 hours, which for a snowboard company is absurd. Most brands wait months for a factory on the other side of the planet to send back a sample. Wired walks across the room.
The same setup makes one-of-one customs possible. Not "pick a colourway", but a properly built board with your artwork, in your size, pressed in Vancouver and tuned by hand before it ships. It also means they can run experimental shapes and limited drops without asking anyone's permission or hitting a minimum order quantity.
The nerd stuff
Dow's tinkering didn't stop at shapes. Wired holds patents on continuous sidewall construction, and Dow has a long history of the kind of common-sense ideas that make you wonder why nobody did it earlier. Lace locks on snowboard boots, for example. Wired was also the first snowboard company to put its whole line into augmented reality, so you could scale a board up in your living room and look at it from every angle. Mostly for fun, according to Dow. Partly so people far from East Van could get close to the boards.
Walsh, Shorty's and the credibility question
In 2021 Devun Walsh joined the team. If that name doesn't land, look up any backcountry part from the late nineties. Walsh is the benchmark for what a trick into pow is supposed to look like, and he and Dow go back to the early nineties contest days when they shared a two-bedroom place in North Vancouver. Walsh got a shape built around his feedback, made in the Wired factory over a summer. For a small BC brand it was a massive shot of credibility. For Walsh it was a mate with a press.
That relationship also led to Wired quietly helping bring back Shorty's, the mid-nineties brand that translated skateboarding onto snow better than almost anyone. That's a fitting footnote. Wired is, at heart, a nineties Vancouver snowboarder's idea of what a board company should be, executed with tools that didn't exist back then.
Why we stock it
Wired's tagline is "Built different. Ridden everywhere." We'd add: built by someone who could have retired on a pro career and instead chose sawdust. Small factory, in-house shapes, real innovation instead of marketing decks. That's the kind of brand that keeps snowboarding interesting, and exactly the kind of brand you won't find in a chain store.