Board Budder is a ski and snowboard brand founded in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2022.
A dental school waitlist gave Board Budder its founder. Erik Smith, an Oakley native, had been making plant-based snowboard wax in his kitchen to ease the stress of applying. He later told the Deseret News, "I ended up having kind of an early midlife crisis, and I realized that I didn't want to be a dentist." He withdrew his application, and Board Budder became a Salt Lake City company instead.
It started in 2022, the same winter Park City released a study tracing fluorocarbon contamination in its drinking water to ski wax. A city fluoro ban followed. Board Budder says its wax contains no paraffin or PFAS and is 100 percent biodegradable. The current lineup took more than 500 formulation iterations, and for a while the lab was Smith's garage.
It began with a van and five Utah ski shops. It is now in 16 states, and after three winters of trials in Utah, REI plans to stock it across the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest for 2026 to 2027. Smith's rule, as he told The Park Record, is that mass adoption won't happen if a green product "costs twice as much and performs half as well."
When Board Budder was starting out, its founders bought Ikon Passes so they could demo the wax at resorts around the country.
