Our founder Andrew Gillespie carries a sketchbook the way other people carry a phone. Planes, evenings, waiting rooms: ideas get jotted down, geometry gets doodled, and most pages stay pages forever. One of them became the thing on your snowboard.
The first idea was more complicated
The earliest concepts were mechanical: cam locks, levers, devices that would clamp your boot to the board. All of them worked on paper and all of them shared a flaw. Complicated things break, and they break on a mountain, in the cold, far from a screwdriver.
So Andrew simplified. Rubber bumpers snapping into a rigid chassis, with the material itself providing the spring. The original sketch of that idea still exists, and what ships today is recognizably the same design. The road from that page to your board was not invention so much as refinement.
What testing changed
Sketches became CAD, CAD became prototypes, and prototypes went up the hill, season after season. Three changes tell the story of what real snow teaches:
The top surface originally had traction ridges for grip. Testing showed the bumpers were doing all the work, so the ridges went. The bumpers were originally solid with gripping ridges. Testing showed that opening up the rubber walls let them flex and spring, gripping far harder. And every edge gained a chamfer, because the first thing a mountain does to any object is try to pack it with ice, and the geometry has to clear snow continuously as your boot goes in.
Every one of those changes made the product simpler, not fancier. That is usually the direction truth takes.
Made here, in small batches
The Pyro is designed, tested and made in the US, in small batches from our workshop in Massachusetts. When you order one, the person packing it is quite possibly the person who drew it first.
