Mervin Vs Never Summer: The Battle of the Banana

Browsing on the web during a slow day in the office I came across an interesting article on the Transworld Business website detailing the rocker/camber hybrid patent war going on between Mervin Manufacturing and Never Summer. I thought you guys might be interested.

Anybody who pays an interest in the latest snowboard designs will have noticed the arrival of a variety of Rocker and Camber hybrid profiles over the last couple of seasons. And it’s not like the designs vary all that much. Rossignol’s Amptek looks just like Nidecker’s Camrock which looks uncannily like Signal’s Wavelength Profile and APO’s Powder rocker and Capita’s Freeride FK profile. Guess what… that’s just the profile which uses camber between the feet and rocker at the nose and tail. All is not well in the neighbouring camp of manufacturers who use rocker between the bindings and camber at the nose and tail. Although Burton, Rome and Nitro are backing this profile it appears Never Summer and Mervin Manufacturing (manufacturers of Lib Tech, GNU and Roxy) are rolling up their sleeves and partaking in a bit of patent fisticuffs. It’s a company’s golden ticket to be granted such a patent, licencing the design can be extremely lucrative, so obviously Mervin want C2 Banana to be the industry standard and Never Summer are keen to protect their recently granted patent on RC technology. Mike Lewis at Transworld Business has created a fantastic article , interviewing Mike Olson co-founder of Mervin (and super nice dude I might add) and Tracy Canaday co-founder of Never Summer, for their sides of the story. If you don’t mind a bit of politics in your snowboarding and you have 10 minutes spare it’s worth a read.

Click here to be linked through to the article on the Transworld Business website

Posted by Rich Ewbank in Blog & News.

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