Indie Spotlight: ReRide
Glasgow-based online snowboard shop, ReRide, is giving a new lease of life to old snowboards and helping mother nature along the way.
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I must have cycled past ‘Unit 2’ about three times before I realised that the industrial estate I was expecting was merely in my imagination. As it turns out ‘Unit 2’ is actually Flat 2', situated in Glasgow’s leafy West End, and functions as the home, office, storeroom and workshop of Russell Waddell and Nathan Amery, founders of online snowboard shop, ReRide.
“It makes us sound more established, I guess,” explains Russell as he invites me in to their lounge-cum-workplace, sitting down between a stack of boards and an empty bottle of whiskey.
The pair met just over a year ago during a season in La Tania in the French Alps. It was there they “hatched a plan” to start ReRide after a night out. “We came up with the idea at five o’clock in the morning,” recalls Russell. “We stood up, shook hands and said if this is all right when we’re sober, then we’ll do it.”
There may be a multitude of online retailers but what makes ReRide different is that it’s the only online snowboard shop that offers a trade-in system when you’re buying a new board. Explains Nathan: “It’s a hassle-free way to get rid of your old snowboard and get money off a new one, without having to go to the effort of listing it on auction websites.”
The reasoning for this service is to promote the reuse of snowboarding hardware, which they believe is better than recycling. The whole company is based round the concept with even the packaging they send stuff out in is reused. It also makes sense from a business point of view, “why pay extra for new boxes?” asks Russell rhetorically.
Russell servicing an old board.
The tools of the trade.
It was in the summer of 2010 on their return to the UK that Russell put this resourceful mind of his to good use writing business plans for ReRide, while Nathan designed the website, that went live in December 2010. In addition to their environmentally-friendly services, they also sell a number of snowboard brands with some ethical credentials including Arbor and, case in point, Never Summer Industries.
“This one here’s the only one in the country right now,” says Nathan, pointing to one model beside him. “Never Summer boards are built to order, they have a three year warranty and are all made by hand in the US, not a massive factory in China. And because they last, there’s more chance you’ll be able to trade them in and they’ll still have value.”
They also take this approach into their apparel section with them stocking such eco-brands as Rapanui. “We wanted to put them in the same setting as the more standard brands [that] get people interested in the site, [then] hopefully they'll discover the independents,” explains Nathan.
“There’s a negative stigma attached to environmental products,” adds Russell. “I think that everything should be genuine and not used as a marketing tool. That’s why we’ve not pushed that we’re environmental, but we’ve got a strong environmental statement on our website. It’s just the norm with us – I think that’s the best way to do it.”
At the moment Russell and Nathan may spend most of their days speaking to clients, marketing, updating the website and pondering where best to open their first shop, but there are always lots of second hand boards in need of a service. And yes, all the wax is eco-friendly, meaning it’s biodegradable and doesn’t contain dangerous flourocarbons!
“[It] works just as well – people can’t tell the difference,” explains Russell. “Petrochemical-based wax ends up in the snow and eventually melts into the ecosystem. In theory, the ideal would be to use entirely reused and recycled materials and environmentally-friendly products, but there’s not enough out there at the moment.”
Nathan and boards.
Bindings, bindings, bindings.
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Indie Spotlight: ReRide (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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