Burton Corporation

I had...

A very good friend of mine was s- one of the founders of Burton Snowboards, and she said she always wanted to have a specialty food store.

She was literally eight months pregnant when she said this to me, and I said to her, "First work in the bakery before you decide to open a [laughs] specialty food store."

[laughs]

Thanks, Mark.

Pericles Perdomo helps run the brand-new Burton flagship store in New York City, a spot that frequently hosts community skate and snowboarding events, collection launches, and rider meetups.

Pericles got his start in snowboarding through Burton's Chill program, a non-profit youth development organization founded in 1995 by Jake and Donna.

Chill combines board sport instruction with a positive youth development curriculum centered on six core values: respect, courage, patience, persistence, responsibility, and pride.

When Pericles and Ken Ock saw each other, they immediately started talking about Camp of Champions, Ken's summer snowboard camp on Blackcomb's Horseman Glacier that ran from '89 to 2017.

Pericles attended camp through the Chill program and then returned to work for several summers.

We popped outside the Burton store to record this interview about Pericles and his life in snowboarding I don't know what he just said.

All right, introduce me and where we're at.

That's what makes it so special.

It was developed back in 2008 in direct partnership with Jake Burton, the founder of Burton Snowboards.

He wanted to bring freestyle back to its raw, natural roots, back to the days when kids would just ride through the woods, jumping off rocks and sliding across fallen logs.

And Avoriaz was the very first resort in Europe to build one.

We're just hitting these little jump ramps with the full kind of fish-style skateboards, the kicktail, tiny noses, just doing little grinds and hand plants, street plants, and little mini ramps and stuff like that.

And then we started snowboarding, and my first board was a Burton 140 Elite, like the blue one.

They just made a reissue of it a few years ago.

and I had a thin and a super wide heavy, and it didn't flex at all.

And even at the time, I was so invested in snowboarding that I was, like, already knew, like, the Burton bindings at the time were, like, kind of old school.

And the Sims bindings were the new school ones because the Burtons had, like, the three straps.

You couldn't tweak in a three-strap one.

So I was already kind of getting ready to get the new Sims bindings and put it on my Burton board so I could tweak more.

So give us some more snow news to keep us cool.

Celebrating the snowboarding in Colorado, the history of snowboarding in Colorado, there was a big event that happened over the weekend at the Burton store in Denver where- We are honoring people being ushered into the Colorado snowboard hall of fame.

Uh, Trent Bush is being inducted in that, but Burton hosted their history, the 50 years of, uh, Burton, which, you know, we we've talked about that, but they hosted this 50 years of like, or the call, like the Colorado portion of this and how significant Colorado.

was in the evolution of snowboarding and it was really cool i've seen a bunch of um a bunch of footage that came out of there you know we had legends from back in the day you know chad otterstrom um chris pappas like all these different people that have been staples of the history of snowboarding to get us where we are here now.

And it's just cool.

It's again, it's, I like these like family reunion where a bunch of old fogies can get together and talk about Rob King while doing the Salto flip in 1999.

Well, I saw also there's a new Burton video that Donna Carpenter is the voiceover actress.

Yeah, it's the history of, it's basically.

And today, we are sharing with you that kickoff session from Blister Summit 2026.

And today, you are going to be hearing from professional skier Kris Rubens from Atomic, Lauren Samuels from Salomon, Shane Chappell from Burton, and Will Ritter, the founder of Spark R&D.

This is a really cool conversation, and I always think it's particularly interesting when we start combining skiers talking with snowboarders to see where there's real overlap in terms of their approaches and where things might be a bit different.

So anyway, this is a good one.

So happy to be with you all here at, uh, Blister Summit, um, and testing some boards.

So yeah, kind of my background in a past life, I was a, a competitive snowboarder.

Was sponsored and, and riding for Burton Snowboards, kind of traveling the world, doing that whole thing, little bit of filming.

Um, and with that, you know, they, they send you a lot of, a lot of product, [laughs] uh, and usually because you're, you're breaking a lot of stuff.

You need to be involved with

Burton snowboards.

Oh,

geez.

I'm like, oh, yeah, Burton, eh? You know, I go through the whole story of Burton, and he would, you know, he was on the ski hills when, you know, it was rebellious to be a snowboarder, and they kicked him off the hills and whatever.

That was my

first snowboard, Burton.

Yeah.