Slowly but surely, the snowboard company – BitchBoards has been creeping up on the snowboard industry. “Made by women for women” is their motto and they are very much about girl power…independent women… ‘all my single ladies’ type stuff. Let me first off say that…I am a chick and I snowboard and appreciate women specific boards.

However, I pretty much laughed out loud when I first came across this company. Bitchboards? Really? I mean...really? How corny and un-original can you get? This name immediately put me off on their approach and entire vibe in general. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of completely going after women’s athletic needs in snowboarding and in most cases, we do need smaller, differently constructed boards so, kudos to them for being one of the first to base their entire company on that concept. But seriously, if you want to become a legit snowboard company in the industry don’t name your company Bitchboards; it’s lame and it hurts my feelings. Stop acting like that refers to a cool, athletic, fun, awesome chick. It does not. Okay, okay, I’ll get off the name tangent.

Beyond the company name, they have seven snowboard models, six of which are all mountain boards. All with equally “sweet” names mind you, (okay maybe I’m not done), like “Lava” and “Couture”. Couture? Are we on Project Runway? They are all described with pretty much the same exact two paragraphs with maybe a thesaurus nearby to make it sound a little different. “This board is a directional freeride snowboard perfect for all mountain riding. Great pop with a medium flex to provide a forgiving and stable ride yet, extremely light weight and easy to control….has carbon fiber reinforcement to support a woman’s lower center of gravity.” (Bitchboards.com) Granted, the majority of snowboard companies all have similar sounding descriptions but this uses the most generic description of snowboards for EVERY board they have which are all meant for the same conditions (sans their new Twin Tip Platinum board, whoo hoo!) but only differ in graphics (I’ll get to those in a sec). They play up the graphics more than they play up the construction of their boards. To make things worse, they’ve added bindings to their hard goods collection. Ah jeez, really? More lame product to give to girls that are buying this stuff? Their graphics are piss-poor and are supposedly trying to be sophisticated and sexy…I don’t know about you but I’m not thinking about being sexy when I’m dropping into the park or when I’m shopping for a board. To be fair – I understand that all chicks are different yada, yada, yada…but for the most part, I’d think a lot of them would agree with me and let’s be honest, a girl on a snowboard is sexy enough, riiigghhtt?

Most of the girls that seem to be following this “Bitchboards are rad” trend come off as being beginners and just starting to understand the concept of riding. Therefore, being fooled with trickery and spending money on ugly (yeah, I said it) mediocre boards. Pretty much every legit snowboard company has a line of women specific boards aimed towards the same concept as Bitchboards however, they know what they are talking about and have way better style and creativity. And they actually have different models, for different level riders, and conditions…imagine that. Seriously, I could keep going but I think I’ve made my point. This company is a joke. Their ads look more like
Vidal Sassoon commercials than they do snowboard ads. Sorry bitches…I mean Bitchboards.

Editor's Note (to Alex Masterson, the founder of Bitchboards): All the guys that work in our office think you're hot, so you can't really be mad over this.