Niche Snowboards is a ski and snowboard brand founded in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2009.
Salt Lake City's Niche Snowboards makes boards designed to come apart, eventually and on purpose. In December 2017 it introduced its first products built with Recyclamine, a resin from Connora Technologies. A specially developed solution dissolves the resin in a finished board or in factory scraps, so the materials inside can be recovered and reused.
Early coverage of the 2009 startup credits Dustin Morrell, who had been building boards himself and found the process "very damaging to my health and the environment." Ana Van Pelt, later named a cofounder, was creative director. The company now bills itself as female-founded and operated.
Then Niche went after the rest of the board. Stringers were hemp instead of carbon fiber, and volcanic basalt replaced fiberglass. Topsheets skip lacquer. In 2012 Niche won an ISPO Eco award.
None of it is pressed in Utah. In 2012 the boards came from the GST factory in a small Austrian town, which Niche's marketing chief said "really takes care of their employees." The brand now says a small town on the Mediterranean makes them. It plants a tree for every purchase, more than 1,000 so far, which covers the wood core.
In 2011 Niche licensed Mervin's Magne-Traction "wiggly edge" and released 60 limited edition Aether 156 boards with a Michael Sieben graphic.
