Hanging with Celtek in San Clemente [Out of Office]

HANGING WITH CELTEK IN SAN CLEMENTE [OUT OF OFFICE]

By Taylor Boyd, San Clemente, CA: “Core” is one of the most used buzzwords in action sports and many brands invest a great deal into appearing as such. Celtek is not trying to be core. They would, however, rank pretty high on the “core scale” if anyone’s counting. It’s impossible to feign the credibility that the brand’s founders Erik and Bjorn Leines have in snowboarding, and Celtek’s presence within the sport would have you believe that the brand is much larger than three people working out of a double-wide shipping container. But that’s what it is. While we were in San Clemente, we hung out in the shipping container and chatted with Celtek co-founder and CEO, Erik Leines, The Mule.

(Oh, and by the time you read this, they will have moved out of the shipping container into a larger office closer to the beach).

Start from the top, Erik. Give us the rundown.

I’m Erik Leines, I’m 35 and I run Celtek. I have two kids and they both snowboard and surf. My brother, Bjorn, is the co-founder. We started Celtek in 2003 when we were both riding as professional snowboarders We knew we wanted to start something probably in 2000, but we finally got everything together and got a factory by 2003. But even when I was a little kid I knew I wanted to create a company. My parents are both super entrepreneurial and I grew up in a family business — my dad had me working to buy my first snowboards at a young age. I bought my first dirt bike with $6 an hour paychecks from working on the pipeline in Minnesota.

When we decided to start the company, we were kinda like, “What do we do, what do we make?” We really thought we could do something different with accessories. We wanted to bring in a lot of unique design, unique art and a lot of our team riders together to create gloves as our core category, along with hats and other accessories. At one point we were like, “We wanna do bags, we wanna do helmets, we wanna do all kinds of stuff.” But the reality is that it was so challenging just to do one thing right that we just stuck with gloves. Between men’s and women’s gloves we have 30 to 35 styles and then facemasks; that’s our number two selling category. We sell quite a bit of women’s product too. Nearly a third of our sales are in women’s product, so we’re pretty hyped on that. We’re not just trying to build a male-driven brand, we’re trying to build a brand for anybody that wants to go up on the hill and have a good time.

Where does most of the art come from?

We work with artists that are our buddies or we’ll seek out somebody who we think is sick. The majority of art in our line right now is by two artists. There’s Dave Doman – he’s a Salt Lake City native. He’s done tons of board graphics over the years for Technine, Salomon and Nitro — a lot of the real famous graphics like the Technine with Eazy on the bottom, Eero Ettala’s boards… So, Bjorn and I were wanting to do this art thing on our product and we were like “Doman’s sick.” So we went after him. We had him do a logo and then some other stuff.

Doman has a huge influence on the line. And Matt French. French is from Washington and he does a ton of stuff in the skate world for Volcom and a ton of people and he actually called Celtek one day and was like, “Hey, what you guys are doing is cool, I’d love to do some art for you.” So we had him start drawing and together we came up with a concept called “Bitten by a Mitten.” That’s one of our best selling products and we do different characters on Bitten by a Mitten each year. Looking forward to 15/16, we’re gonna be collaborating with Don Pendleton. We’re always looking at other artists.

Give us the tech talk…

When we started the brand we didn’t want to just make a cool looking product. Being pro snowboarders, being in the mountains so much of our lives, we wanted to make products that worked. There was a point when we had some pretty bad product. But we’ve really been able to morph our line to include quality technical products. The top of our line features OutDry; it’s great for the Northwest. It’s the best waterproofing process that you can come by because with a glove, the way most inserts work there’s a big gap between the outer shell of the glove and where the membrane is, so even Gore-Tex has a gap between those two layers of fabric. OutDry is a waterproof membrane that’s laminated to the inside of the outer shell. It was started by these two guys in Italy. If you’ve ever ridden an OutDry product you know how amazing it is. Keeping our customers warm and happy on the hill is our goal. That’s how we think of every product when we design it. “Is this going to keep them warm and dry?” If not, should they even be taking this to the mountain?

Anything specific call-outs for the 2015 line that just came out?

The gold gloves have been getting a lot of attention. They’re pretty eye-catching. No one’s ever really made a glove that looks like that before. We’re also making more gloves that work with touchscreens. We’re honing in the facemask zone, so now we’ve got a facemask and two balaclavas made of Merino wool. It’s gonna just keep you warm and dry on the hill. In the women’s line we’ve got kittens on a lot of the stuff.

Kittens seem to be working right now. What’s up with that snowboard with Doman’s art on it?

Each season, when we’re coming up with our seasonal campaigns and graphic stories and we’re always trying to figure out what the next look is gonna be for the line. We had Dave Doman send us over a ton of different things he’s been up to and what he’s been doing, so he sent us over like 30 different photos of all these different pieces of art he’s created recently and one of the photos he’d painted on a snowboard and we were like “Wow, that’s really sick.” So, we were like, “Alright Doman, what do you think of doing a new campaign, just taking a snowboard and just making one to represent the new line.” First he Bondo’d the whole thing and started putting different layers of paint on it and sent us photos all the way through.” Kids kept seeing it on Instagram and they’d think it’s an actual board you could go buy.

You wanna talk about the Celtek video, Nothing to Prove?

Yeah, Bjorn, and I were talking about a year ago — Celtek’s never really put out any kind of content, really. We’ve bought photos of our team riders and put them in ads and we’ve been at tradeshows, but we’ve never really put out any type of content. So we collectively decided, instead of him filming another video part for one of the major companies, let’s do something through a new production company, so it was originally not gonna be a Celtek project and that’s how it ended up. It’s Celtek Presents: Nothing to Prove, but it’s also sponsored by Under Armour, Stance, Dye, ProTec, Super Top Secret. So, the idea was instead of Bjorn going out and filming a video part, we would kind of raise funds to make a new project. We wanted to make the project around something we totally related to which was snowboarding in Minnesota, where we grew up, in the Midwest. Half the movie’s about snowboarding in the Midwest. And then, we would go out to Utah in the winter and snowboard there as kids so we made the movie kind of about that, about riding in the Midwest and riding in Utah and so it’s around two different locations of riding and then there’s jam sessions within it so there’s no rider parts in the movie. We’re stoked on how it turned out. It went so far above and beyond our expectations. Our director of photography, Leland McNamara, he just crushed it. It was during the polar vortex, it was like -30 degree weather. A lot of work went into it and then to see how it all turned out, was awesome. So many people contributed to it and it turned out insane.

Are you talking about next year’s project yet?

We’re definitely gonna do a new movie. We’re not calling it a movie. It’s just a new content project going forward so we’re about to release what it’s gonna be. We’re still in the ideation stage, but we know what the name’s gonna be. We’re really close to being able to release what that’s gonna be.

Thanks, Erik.

Thank you.

You can watch Nothing to Prove below and shop Celtek here.