Photographer, filmmaker and snowboarder Balazs Kovacs has a very own philosophy when it gets to powder shapes. But with Amplid's "Weird Blanks" he can free his mind and turn his weirdest dream shape into reality...
There are days (=and snow conditions) when you simply have to turn off your computer, cancel your meetings and go out for a ride. Nothing beats a good day out in the pow with the crew you work with. Two days ago was one of those days, with 40 cm of fresh and no other tracks except ours.
Snowboarder and filmmaker Mario Käppeli loves to collect moments. He is addicted to documenting happenings, ideally from somewhere out there in the wild mountain world. Stored in his brain or on hard drives, those moments cater as entertaining fireside tales, or simply as ingredients to make short movies about splitboarding with friends.
The Snommelier is one of five boards in Amplid’s “Future Shapes” collection, which Amplid describes like this: “Peter’s [Amplid Founder] most bonkers board concepts, Amplid’s Future Shapes snowboard family snubs the last 40 years of snowboard know-how in a bid to bring fresh ideas to the fore. Experimental by design, these colourful rogues are not just different for the sake of it: each board’s dimensions are artfully curved and skillfully balanced to create a unique personality.”
When our friend and photographer Rasmus Kaessmann called in the other day, desperately begging for a 135 cm short splitboard for his son Taavi, PB intervened: „Hey buddy, I will send you something - including instructions. Please film it with your phone.“ Deal!
Check Taavi’s stoke – priceless! We can‘t stop watching it. Thanks for sharing the love!!!
Check Taavi’s stoke – priceless! We can‘t stop watching it. Thanks for sharing the love!!!
Amplid came to the conclusion that companies who profit from the use of the environment should – at least - strive to do no harm to the planet, and in the best case actively work to help repair the damage we’ve already inflicted. Building snowboards will always have an environmental footprint, so our goal is to minimize this footprint, whenever possible, by developing new eco-tech and manufacturing processes. And by being the first snowboard company to follow such an eco-correct manufacturing process, Amplid won the first ISPO Eco Award already in 2012 with their “Green Light Project” in.
Trimming splitboard climbing skins can take a little patience and attention to detail, so don’t save it for the last minute. There's nothing worse than cutting your skins in the parking lot and ending up slipping off sidehills and dragging a whole bucket of snow up the skin track with you. Plus your friends will not be impressed.
Heavy snow sticking on your splitboard's topsheet? Annoying. Amplid has been researching with snow repellent surfaces for quite a while. The new nano-corund finnishing used in all 20/21 splitboards is a very big step towards solving stick-snow-issues. But what if the sun heats of the topsheet, and snow starts to stick on the surface again? Amplid founder and tech wizzard Peter Bauer presents a genious and sustainable solution in this new NOTES FROM THE LAB episode…
The intense sensation of riding waist deep powder is based on several factors – but the most powerful one is probably the trivially appearing phenomena known as „spray“. Regardless of whether you feel its uncompared freshness in your face, see the light-reflecting diamonds against the sunlight, or hear the noise of a crystal explosion.
In snowboarding you have park kids, groomer fans, sidecountry riders, backcountry shredders, and "only a few" guys like Lauri Hilander (=yes, that is his real name!) from Finland, who have higher aims. Higher as in "above 8.000m". Follow Lauri during his prepping phase to splitboard up to Cho Oyu - and obvously ride it down along the tibetian side. Really cool and mellow vlog, reflecting Lauri's personality a 100%.
Since splitboard development has reached the end of the road in terms of weight optimization, Peter, founder of Amplid, wanted to know if it is possible to further reduce the weight of his splitboards during the ascent. Because we all dislike heavy snow, which sticks sometimes more or less on our skis during the ascent. Especially not when it resists repeated scraping. So Peter Bauer developed the Stratospheric Topsheet. This is supposed to reflect incoming heat radiation better from the board, therefore causing a cooler surface on which the snow no longer sticks.
The new split innovation at Amplid is a mixture of the Milligram (for construction) and Millisurf (for shape), with this shortened fish tail it is pleasant to turn short and lean on it with confidence. So it is clearly a Millisurf a little bit more solid and less in search of absolute lightness. Although technical, this is not the kind of board that is appreciated at the first curve, it takes a little time to adjust, because she wants to move forward and she doesn't have much patience.
PB: I had been working at Burton for 16 years and went through the full transition from a team rider to being heavily involved with R&D. It was actually one of the factory owners who produced for Burton back then who triggered the thinking process of starting my own brand. That was in 2004. And now here we are with Amplid!
Complete and versatile personality, wherever you take it. The Ticket changes constantly, adapting to the needs of the moment and remai¬ning true to itself, on all types of snow. It is the board that knows how to do everything and knows how to do it well. This all mountain stick has Benn created from the legendary and award-winning Paradigm as a starting point: it will amaze you, combining an easy-care base and low camber with the result of an economical board, made to last.
When you've tasted it, it's hard to do without this Spray Tray in the powder... And as a bonus, this mini swallowtail also knows how to show itself very versatile and accessible. It is part of the Future Amplid's Shape, a pure line of ingeniously designed boards for maximum efficiency, with a directional shape on which the inserts are very close to the tail. The front spatula, very wide, goes up to the tail.
This book is the product of two years of following some of the most dedicated female snowboarders around the world. It contains the resulting medium format photographs and the 28 lith prints from the main body of work, details on how they were crafted, as well as the rider’s very personal stories, their words and works of arts. It is a declaration of love, a historic highlight of the culture, the passion and dedication of Women in Snowboarding.
Amplid have, for most of their 15-year history, catered to those with more refined tastes. To those who value the finer things in life. To those who don’t simply equate good value to low-cost. They are, to an extent, the connoisseur’s choice of snowboards. But who says you need to be a world-class sommelier to get completely shit faced off a bottle of Chateau Lafite...
Amplid's "Between the Lines" wants to shed light onto the unknown stories happening in the backstage area of our snowboard life. What does it take to run a snowboard company? RnD to get the product right is one important task. Marketing as in "getting emotion into the brand" is another one. But one of the most important job is "sales". Have a look at this episode and listen to Amplid's "Big Wig of Sales" Gregor Common...
All aboard! The Surf Shuttle is one of Amplid’s new splitboards for the 2020/21 season. It’s built for endless repeat journeys into the backcountry. Combining the powder-primed shape of the Millisurf with the bombproof construction of the Tour Operator, it’s highly adept at holding its nerve in low tide, but truly comes to life when the waves are pumping.
Imagine you replace a board’s carbon with a sustainable sugar cane based weaving, without adding weight? Possible? Amplid founder and tech wizard PB tried out the first prototype ever built, and the result was quite surprising…
Do you want us to make YOUR weirdest Amplid dream shape? Board design is a never ending process, it’s Amplid’s DNA and we have been pushing shape development really hard to follow our path of „next level riding“. In RnD we have to explore the weirdest extremes in order to understand how the future will look like.
Imagine riding waist deep powder in August! You thought you have to travel to the southern hemisphere to do that? Not when the weather goes crazy like this summer in the Alps. Follow the Amplid x Pally'Hi crew on their little road trip to the Hintertux Glacier…
„A life behind the lense“. Where would snowboarding be without photos and videos, stimulating our day dreams and catering food for our neverending hunger for riding. But who is taking those images? What kind of people are on the other side of the lens? How is their everyday job routine? What equipment does it require to get those sick shots?
Would you cross a pond, 23 km deep, filled with boiling sulfuric acid, the habitat of reptiloid man eating piranhas? Well, Mary Steiner, Jelle Beenker, Stewart Orr and Balazs Kovacs showed some balls and did. And survived. Barely. Watch the „Black Hole of Death“. Filmed and directed by BK.
