Smell the gloves
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Drop test-drives its way to snowboard gear stardom
by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR
Every weekday Olie Van Roost, his identical twin Mir and two fellow twentysomething colleagues pause discussions about spandex, neoprene and corduroy and escape their second-floor office on the Main near Mont-Royal. They toss skateboards into bags of their own design and head to the mountain for a rough couple of hours of product testing.
The apparent display of arrested development is part of the thinking that has helped the team rapidly raise their company, Drop, to near the top of the market in skateboard and snowboard knapsacks and gloves.
When not zooming around on oblong injury machines, the staff of four lives vicariously through its crack team of star boarders whose approval of their products has helped raise their corporate profile. Plus, the celebrity endorsers also provide sometimes-inadvertent product testing. "One of our riders in Austria just got through 100 feet in an avalanche and his pack didn't tear," says Van Roost with a slightly disconcerting indifference to the fate of the boarder, who is apparently fine. "You could use one of our bags for 10 years, easily. You could wear the gloves for 10 years depending on how hard you ride and how hard you beat 'em up."
In less than four years the company has grabbed a third of all sales in its field by focussing on a market dominated by youths aged 14 to 23, selling a product ranging from $40 to $120.
Van Roost, originally a graphic artist, has since become a scholar in search of the perfect "tight-fitting gloves with really good palm fabrics. You're always grabbing your board in snow boarding, so it's important you have a sticky palm and something that resists your edge 'cuz the edge is sharp."
If it's not giving away too much, the secret to success in waterproof-but-breathable handwear is a Gore-Tex design constructed of insert, insulation, outside fabric and liner, all heated together with a glue heat seal. Like all mystically indescribable ideals, glove perfection is best described through negation. "You want it warm enough, not too warm and not too bulky, you don't want to be wearing a boxing glove."
Drop--bankrolled by the 40-year-old Montreal company Gordini, named after a Montrealer named Gordie with an obsession for all things Italian--has also scored with a handy patent-pending knapsack with a gimmick they call Glide Access: pockets you can pull forward that snap right back with a bungee track. This and more can be perused at www.dropmfg.com or at specialty boarder shops.
Drop can be reached at 842-8181
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