Mervin Co-founder Mike Olson
Mervin Manufacturing, the company behind Lib Technologies and Gnu and owned by Quiksilver, recently received an allowance for a patent on its Banana Technology reverse camber for snowboards. Never Summer received a patent for its Rocker/Camber patent on September 21. We caught up with Mervin Mfg. Co-founder Mike Olson to learn more about the patent process, what their patent covers, and how it differs from Never Summer’s.
Give me a little history of your patent application.
We began the testing and prototyping of Banana contours in 2006. We realized how revolutionary Banana was from the first run at Ski Acres. We would sit around a table and giggle like kids about a short “Skatebanana” thingy that I had sketched over and over. I had drawn out funky new contours that looked like a clown show. For the last two decades, snowboards had camber. Eventually, Pete got excited to make a Banana, and in a length that people would actually ride without getting laughed at (too much!). Pete and Annette rode the first one at night at Ski Acres. It was a 156cm board with massive Banana contours. Pete called back to the factory freaking. It worked so well that Annette, our Lib art director from Berlin, who is very lightweight and loves smaller boards, was freaking about how it was way too big for her and still her favorite board. Annette’s emotion sealed the deal.
Temple Cummins (four time Baker Banked Slalom champ) and Pete went on the second day of testing and Pete said Temple laid out the the prettiest carves he’d ever seen Temple do, and that is a remarkable statement. Everyone started talking patent. The industry was in a downward spiral at the time, so it really needed a tech boost to bring back excitement to try and buy more boards. Mervin was already growing like flapjacks at this time because of our Magne-Traction tech.
Mike Olson with the Gnu line in 1988. Note the shape of the brown board in the middle of the line up. Photo: Ron Dahlquist
I finally got to ride a Banana myself a week later. It was the world’s iciest day with rain starting and the slope was dead-on empty. I arched a one footed ice carve (Burtner would love it) off of the chair ramp and knew it was the biggest evolution jump in snowboard history.
So, I started working on a patent. I chose [our] attorney because he is a real soft spoken gentleman and he himself cut his teeth as a U.S. Patent examiner.
We wrote [the patent] very simple and broad. We knew we couldn’t patent some of our double camber features because as most people know, Inca had already patented dual camber snowboards in 1998, and only older wiser snowboarders will remember that the Gnu Raceroom Factory manufactured and sold some dual camber snowboards ten years prior to Inca from 1987-88.
We applied for patent protection on May 4, 2007, after a full season of refinement in all snow conditions.
Do you have two separate patent’s pending for Banana and C2?
Yes, kind of. We have one patent that has been “allowed” which means approved and final fees paid, so pending might not be the right terminology anymore I suppose, and a second one that is still pending but could be approved any day, week, month, now. The one that was “allowed” should show up with its official patent numbers and fake ribbon in the next several days, or weeks depending on which snail pace it’s on. I’ve received patents before, and after all that effort, they come with a fake ribbon.
Banana Technology
A look at one of the diagrams on which Mervin's forthcoming patent is based
What exactly do they cover?
We really tried to keep our patent very simple and very broad as a strategy, because we know from past experience that patent examiners like to tell you to hone it down a little. You don’t want to start out by pigeonholing your patents. Our first patent is a bit more specific and our second one is a bit more broad. We are covering any board that has ends that spring up when unweighted and spring down when weighted such that they can have a better weight distribution on the snow than traditional single camber, old fashioned dual cambers, or old fashioned rocker outside the feet. We cover rocker between the binding mounting zone with any zany contour outside of the mounting zone as long as part of the tip and tail can contact the snow when weighted. We’ve patented what looks like a whacky pogo-board, but it sure does work.
How does your patent differ from Never Summer’s?
Both ours and Never Summer’s patents describe something very, very different. Never Summer has one independent claim (claim #1) which is the only stand-alone claim. If an independent claim lacks originality, all other claims drop also. Drawings in a patent are very much secondary to claims and don’t carry nearly as much weight.
From the best I can connect the dots, their stand alone claim #1 appears to describe the drawing on the cover page of the Inca (Donald Stubblefield) patent from 1998 except that the Never Summer board is doing a manual at one end and their claim #1 doesn’t allow the board to flex. The Never Summer stand-alone claim #1 also doesn’t describe any rocker zone at all, or even mention bindings.
The Never Summer patent drawings don’t seem to correspond much to their only stand-alone claim #1. The drawings also don’t correspond much to the boards that Never Summer is producing and selling. The drawings show boards with tunnels on the ends that can never be flattened out to contact the snow. Both Never Summer’s production boards and what we now call the “C2″ blend of Banana are very different than Never Summer’s patent claim and drawings by a long shot.
It is important for everyone who has already forgotten or never did look at our Banana boards from our first Banana SIA in January of 2007, to remember that we already had six different blends of Banana contours on our boards at the show. We introduced classic yellow Skatebanana models, Cygnus X1 Bananas, and TRS Bananas. I, as a long-time surfboard shaper and a few others of us, kind of wanted to name all of our contours because on surfboards, we do name contours. But our sales team and marketers wisely decided to not have six different names for contour blends. The retailers that we consulted with also suggested to keep it simple at first. Anyways, all of our TRS Bananas and many of our 159cm classic Skatebananas had camber on the ends. We theorized that longer boards and boards that were designed for a tighter ride, were the best candidates for camber out near the tips and tails.
A look at some of the other diagrams on which Mervin's forthcoming patent is based
For the first two selling seasons, with our sales teams and in our factory, we called the Banana blends with camber on the ends “Pickled W” (M upside down for the THC crew) and everyone likely remembers that our brochures and tradeshow booths featured giant billboards of George W. looking pickled. By March of 2008, the month before Never Summer had started their patent process, Torah Bright had already won her second consecutive U.S. Open on a Roxy Banana with Pickled “W” dual camber. I still remember our VP of production, Jeff Kempf, and I stuffing Torah’s board into the Fed Ex box and laughing that for our pro halfpipe team Pickled W was hereby named “Spin-Stopper Tech” because both pro women and especially pro men were starting to look like male figure skaters in the halfpipe, and of course I sincerely mean that as a compliment. I wish I was a male figure skater.
We decided to officially give the retailers and snowboarders a name for our Pickled W Banana blend after Nitro, Burton, and Never Summer announced their renditions of Banana in the spring of 2008, months after we had finished 2 complete SIA selling seasons without a competitor. I wanted to keep the name Pickled W, but it was decided by our sales and marketing team that it might be a little too political for some people, so we contemplated between “Double Reverse Banana(Dr. Banana)”, Banana Revert, or simply C2. We decided to go with C2 which wasn’t as fun, but is easy to remember. Nitro simultaneously announced their Gullwing dual camber, and Burton announced the “Hero” which was much like our Yellow Skatebananas, [while] at the same time Never Summer announced their dual camber.
Mervin Co-founder & VP of Marketing Pete Saari with a 2007 TRS Banana he rode in the Mt. Baker Banked Slalom that year.
How do you see things playing out from here between you guys?
I’ve always heard that these Never Summer brothers were some nice fellows who really like their bow hunting. I’ve never, in all our SIA years, met them. I’d like to play in their SIA hockey game someday.
I talked to NS brother Tim Canaday, the head of NS production, on the phone several months after they announced their “Recurve” dual camber. We had sent them a letter to let them know that they had forgotten to look at our giant SIA banner and brochures that were promoting our “ReCurve Camber” name in our NAS [Narrow Ass Snowboards or ski] program. Tim Dutton went on to win the World Extreme Championships in Alaska on our ReCurve Technology later. We thought it might be good marketing for them not to be confused with our already established “ReCurve” name for Narrow Ass Snowboards.
I offered up an olive branch and told Tim that we would be happy to work with them should our patent be granted. I assumed that they had been bluffing their patent pending because that is not an uncommon practice and I know the owner of Inca (Don Stubblefield) and he said that he didn’t know anything about Never Summer. Tim was real nice and we talked for over two hours because we have a lot in common with our passion for getting in the factory and getting dirty and making boards in the USA.
I gave Tim a history lesson about our “Pickled W” dual camber that had already been on the market for two seasons on our boards. I know the Colorado retailer that talked NS into making Banana type boards, and they were sold out of our TRS Pickle W dual camber models so the NS crew borrowed a yellow Skatebanana. The NS crew forgot to look at all of our Banana models. The TRS had been our number-one selling board for years. I told Tim that it might be wise to save some cash on their legal bills to pursue their own patent because we already had two patents pending and Inca had three patents locked down and it would be hard to work around five patents and thousands of Lib Tech TRS Bananas.
I also told Tim that we are the nicest snowboard company on earth and we have a long and famous history of charging pizza for patent use. Rome, Salomon, and Ride still owe us pizza for years of Aircore use. Other snowboard brands have been more generous with the pizza for our Patents Program.
I want to set the record straight, because retailers and our crew that is out in the field have dug up misleading fibs and gossip swirling around that needs some correcting.
A look at Mervin's C2 Technology.
Did Mervin contest Never Summer’s patent or did they contest yours at all?
We never even looked at it until a few days ago. Never Summer did try to challenge our process twice now. I used one mellow hometown patent attorney through this whole patent process. Contrary to gossip, Quik’s legal staff has probably never heard of Never Summer. If this was a football game, Never Summer would owe us two free kicks on their goal.
What will be your next steps?
We haven’t really had any formal discussions in our company regarding our two patents for Banana. It would really be a waste of life, to have a patent strategy meeting until we have the real patent with the fake ribbon in our hands, which is still several days away. We’ve been too busy to think about patents. I guess pretty much BBQ chicken or pineapple and olive come to mind.
What are your goals in patenting your technology?
We are always hungry for pizza and also as I told Tim two years ago, we had hoped to license the patent to the companies that have been good for the industry and give all of us that have the license a way to give specialty retailers a unique board design with an advantage over the bottom feeder discount retailers that can’t get these boards. Mervin has experienced this model since the beginning of Magne-Traction and now Banana. Retailers are loving it and so are we. Our sales are booming. We built a new 10,000-[square] foot building next to our factory last year and now we’re building another new building this fall. We now build about 700 boards a day, all year around.
What would be your message to retailers on what your patent and this debate means for them?
I hope Mervin’s plan for this spectacular little base contour can continue to help retailers hold their healthy margins and will allow us to keep enough margin that Mervin will always be able to handcraft all of our boards like we are right now near Canada in the USA.
TAGS: banana patent, banana technology, mervin manufacturing, mike olson, never summer rocker camber patent
