Our Story
A JOURNEY TOWARDS RESPONSIBLE SNOWBOARDING
Imagine a world where you could get a unique board shaped for your needs, with the design you want. Imagine this board being handcrafted responsibly with natural materials, and engineered with aerospace technology. Imagine you are dreaming into reality! Here is the Baguette story.
2006, CHAMBERY, FRANCE
Three students sitting on the benches of school, remaking the world. We, Ben, Thom & Eymeric once shared dreams and visions about our relationship to the mountain environment. Growing up in the Alps with a passion for snowboarding made us want to follow a professional path in the world of winter sports. At the time, most of the snowboard production was being relocated offshore, which was obviously a bummer for finding a job. Besides, the existing model of mass-produced series of identical boards travelling the whole world before ending up on our feet never really matched our colorful vision of snowboarding. So we initiated our own network of values and expertise, in the idea of creating a snowboard brand where each shape could be unique and different.
2008, ANNECY, FRANCE
Artistic connection. With our heads full of dreams, we enrolled at the Polytech Savoie school of Engineering which proposed a unique specialty in composite materials, the essence of snowboard constructions. Annecy is a dynamic city at the foot of the Alps fostering creativity, art and snow sports. Well known for its animated movie festival, the Art By Friends gallery or the High Five ski and snowboard festival, the city gathers an ecosystem of artists, photographs and videographers gravitating around mountain sports. Our stay in Annecy definitely shaped our sensibility to the artistic world, and marks the start of collaborations with painters, designers and illustrators.
2011, HALL IN TIROL, AUSTRIA
Into the heart of the Alps. After a brief visit in 2008, it became clear that some chapters of the Baguette story had to be written in Austria. In July 2011, we moved to Hall in Tirol and started building boards in a basement refurbished into a fully functional workshop. These underground times marked the beginning of a long development phase, a quest to understand the mechanics of the ride. Since day one, each board was built with a purpose, designed for a certain rider profile and shaped for a specific terrain. Exploring custom possibilities has always been the heart and soul of our approach, our stimuli for achieving riding perfection.
THE Team
2017, INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA
A deep dive into snowboard mechanics. In the process of shaping a snowboard, a few questions quickly arise. Some of them can be addressed according to a rider intuition, but some others are more challenging. For instance, how do you adjust the thickness profile of the board to optimize pop and deformations? How do you draw a sidecut line in order to achieve a specific carving behaviour? How to combine the materials efficiently to reduce weight and achieve perfomance? To answer these questions, Ben completed in 2022 a PhD in Snowboard Mechanics at the University of Innsbruck on the topic “Numerical Optimization of Winter Sports Equipment”. Ground breaking discoveries were made, thus redefining the state of the art of snowboard mechanics and opening up on a whole new world of technical innovations.
2020, LA MOTTE EN BAUGES, FRANCE
Back to the roots. Pandemics reshuffled the cards in the sourcing and supply of raw materials. In order to gain independence and to control the provenance of wood, the main constituent of our boards, the family carpenter’s workshop back at home in Les Bauges, France was set up to process wood from scratch. From harvesting trees to cutting planks for building our own wood cores, we are proud to control each step of the process independently! The use of natural materials such as wood, cork and bamboo is enabled by structural analysis, and constitute a key feature of each Baguette Board.
2022, AMPASS, AUSTRIA
In the summer of 2022, a modernized manufacturing line was set up in Ampass, Tirol, redefining the state of the art of handcraft manufacturing in an attempt to conjugate handmade traditions with technological innovations. Co-located with the carpentry workshop Nota Bene, we aim at producing better, smarter products close to our consumers. The production process was designed such that every board can feature a different outline, stiffness profile or graphics, without increasing our lead time. With the use of automated tools such as laser cutter and CNC edge bender, the creation of unique shapes and custom boards has never made so much sense!
2023, TO BE CONTINUED
Thanks to your continuous support, we have been able to keep expanding while preserving the core values of our identity along the way. Thanks to your precious feedback, we are able to keep improving the quality of our boards and increase our riding knowledge, shape after shape. We are truly excited about the upcoming times! Be a part of it, and let’s write together the next pages of the Baguette story.