A chat with Krush Kulesza of Snowboy Productions

 Snowboy is made up of a group of snowboarders that also happen to be good at fabricating, designing, marketing and working really long days to get the job done. Our main crew consists of myself, Neil Green, Geoff Short, Jeff Hambleton and Kevin Turner in addition to a network of other amazing people that we team-up with in different regions.

We specialize in snowboard events in both urban settings as well as on-mountain. We are most widely know for creating the Holy Oly Revival and the Downtown Throwdown, as well as The Feeders!, Greenhorn Games, Boxes for Days, Kinko de Mayo and a few new ones this year including Tube City.

Lucrative…haven’t ever heard that word associated with Snowboy! As I mentioned, I started Snowboy because the contests being held in the Inland Northwest (Eastern WA and Northern ID) were shitty. I figured I could bitch about it or I could try and do something about it. We spent four or five years putting on boardercross and big air events in that area. We never made a dime but we learned a lot and created an alternative to the bullshit that was there before us.

I then took a job at the Summit at Snoqualmie in ’02 and put Snowboy on the back burner for a year. The events I created for the Summit were well received and that gave me the confidence to give Snowboy another shot in the Seattle market.

This spring I left the Summit to focus on growing the events I have created in the last 6 years like the Downtown Thowdown, The Feeders!, Greenhorn Games and Boxes for Days. I was also just hired to start an events program for Mervin Mfg as their Global Events Manager. The role at Mervin is amazing because they have been the biggest supporters of the events I have created in the past so it’s just expanding on what we have been doing, instead of having to start from scratch.

It was just a side project for years. Eventually I guess I got good at it and I’ve been fortunate for it to grow it into a career. I still don’t think of it as a job though, this is the same shit I would be doing even if I was still framing houses like I was 15 years ago.

Most of the events we do we create from the ground up so we have total control on those. We make sure we are looking out for the sponsors interests too, but we make sure that doesn’t get in the way of the riders and the overall feel of the event. There is a good balance there where core and corporate can co-exist…but you really have to work hard to make it work.

Other events we are just hired to build and maintain the set-up so we give input when it’s needed or when it’s asked for and shut up the rest of the time.

For most events we’re planning every detail for 8-12 months before the event happens. We create all the images and advertising, we secure all the locations and handle all the permitting, insurance and other red tape. We handle getting all the sponsors to pay for the events, the media relations to have it covered, the riders, judges, emcees, dj’s and everything else needed. It’s crazy when you think about how long you work for an event that is over in 5 or 6 hours.

We come up with about 95% of the events we are a part of. We’re always talking with riders and industry friends about what is missing or what we could be doing better. Once we get a concept we try and come up with a name, create the image/poster, figure out the location/s and then go sponsor hunting to make it a reality.

Occasionally we have a sponsor approach us to do an event. We have worked with Salomon/Bonfire on their Back Yard Bang events and we did a couple events for Nike 6.0 on their World HQ in Beaverton. These are a lot easier because we are just a sub-contractor and don’t have to create the branding, do the paperwork or sell the event. Just build it, maintain it and take it back down.

We did a small slopestyle event at Lookout Pass on the Idaho/Montana boarder back in 2001. Total shit-show. Truck broke down on the way to the mountain, the cat broke down about 20 times during the build…nothing was going right. We finally got a decent course built and called it a night. The next morning as we were walking up to the zone I watched as the groomer tried to groom up the landing and effectively dug a giant pit right in the landing of the jump. For the next 3-4 hours we tried to fix the hole by hand using shitty Ace Hardware shovels. It was me, Neil Green and Louie Fountain, who had drove up from Moscow, ID to be a guest judge for the event. This was just after he had the opener in the first Robot Food movie and it was also the first time I had even met Louie or had a current pro-rider involved with an event. And here he was filling in this giant hole. The event went on and we stoked out a couple dozen kids but I will always remember how Louie helped give back that day.

I want to thank snowboarding for giving me a focus for my energy, and allowing me to give back to something that has provided me with more then I could ever imagine. Thanks to the sponsors who believe in the ideas, the riders that legitimize the ideas and the crew who make the ideas a reality.