Getting to this point, he says, required a huge amount of work – and in many ways has been even more daunting than launching the Jones brand from scratch. If you’re thinking that the COVID-riddled nature of our present times is the key factor, remember that his company dropped its initial high-end, premium-priced hardware offering at the peak of the global financial crash. No, for once the ‘rona’s not to blame.
“For me with the snowboards, I got to a situation where it was so clear to me that I needed to do that on my own. I just desperately needed really good products to achieve my snowboarding goals, so I did not lose a lot of sleep over starting Jones Snowboards… but there’s virtually no hardgoods company that has had success in outerwear. So out of respect to all the ones that have struggled, I had to say, ‘who the hell am I to have the answers to crack the code on this?’ Yeah, it was tough to wrap my head around.”
“I just desperately needed really good products to achieve my snowboarding goals, so I did not lose a lot of sleep over starting Jones Snowboards”
He wasn’t going in cold, of course; much as his 19 years at Rossignol gave him a fine knowledge base upon which he could craft a line of snowboards, so too did his time at O’Neill outerwear provide an outerwear apprenticeship of sorts. “Both those relationships were amazing, and I would not be here without O’Neill or Rossignol, but it got to a point, like, ‘you know what? I really feel like I got a good understanding of how to develop product’.”
Be that as it may, no-one truly ‘goes it alone’ in this line of work, and Jeremy relies on a crack team of industry lifers to help him realise his vision. “We have a clothing developer, Chris Westen, who’s been developing textiles for a really long time. That’s been his life’s work. He knows these different fabric manufacturers and is very close with them, and is going, ‘hey, we need you to prototype this fabric that you’ve never worked with, and we want to start testing it’. That’s a lot of energy; we’re not just handed a fabric menu. There are no shortcuts; test, tweak, repeat.”
Westen’s fellow recruits include Josh Neilsen, formerly of Patagonia, Nikita founder Heida Birgisdottir, and Martijn Linden, who joined the team from Burton last summer. Then there’s the man Jeremy calls the ‘Clothing Yoda’, Lee Turlington. “He’s been in the clothing industry since 1976, when he started at The North Face. He helps keep us from walking off the edge of a cliff… It’s really exciting. I’ve sat around a lot of design tables, and this one is the best.”
There are no shortcuts; test, tweak, repeat”