Stumptown Snowboards Celebrates Three Decades

When Stumptown Snowboards launched in 1992, Joe Tabor started selling gear out of a 150-square-foot closet on Second Street East in Whitefish, behind a former record store called the Sound Garden.

Since then, Joe’s partner Kristin Tabor, who would eventually become his wife, joined the Stumptown team as a co-owner, it relocated twice, and they added a second shop on Big Mountain. This December, the snowboard shop celebrated its 30th anniversary in downtown Whitefish, where it has been situated on Central Avenue since 1997.

Back in the early 1990s, Joe said the sport was just starting to become more mainstream. Because he knew just about every local snowboarder in town, Joe understood firsthand the size of the unmet demand, which he wanted to fulfill.

“I just saw the very limited access to purchasing – it was so new, and it was progressing so quickly,” Joe said. “Ski shops didn’t like to deal with snowboards and getting spare parts was a nightmare.”

Originally a skier, Kristin says she was home from college one day and as she was riding up the lift at Big Mountain, she saw a mob of World Cup snowboarders riding down a groomed run wearing hard boots.

“I watched them come down and I thought, ‘Wow, what’s that? I need to do that,” she said.

Kristin soon rented a snowboard from Joe, who she was not yet dating, and returned her gear late.

In the early days, Joe and Kristin had no employees and both worked at the shop. When they shut down at the end of the day, they both headed out to wait tables.

Thirty years later, Joe says Stumptown and Board of Missoula are the two oldest snowboard shops in the state.

The Tabors say snowboarding technology has changed dramatically since Stumptown opened, with the most dramatic evolution spanning the last decade. In recent years, there’s been a strong demand for splitboards, which allow snowboarders to split their snowboards in half and attach climbing skins to ascend backcountry terrain. When the rider is ready to descend, the two halves are rejoined as a snowboard.

“COVID kicked it into overdrive,” Kristin said.

The pandemic prompted a sharp demand in splitboards, she said, but there’s been a steady rise in their popularity over the past 15 years as technology has improved. In addition to splitboards, they continue to see strong demand for regular snowboards, especially for brands like Lib Tech, Never Summer and GNU.

When COVID briefly shut down businesses in 2020, the Tabors saw the break as an opportunity to remodel the Central Avenue location and expanded the shop during what they thought would be a quiet summer.

“It went exactly the opposite,” Kristin said. “We were busier than ever that summer. Builders were busier than ever, and everything just piled on itself.”

In the summer, Stumptown Snowboards transforms into an “inland surf shop,” selling skateboards and brands like Billabong and Quiksilver. Kristin says the shop is more like a boutique during the busy tourist summer months and they wind up with even more traffic in the shop.

Eventually, they finished the remodel, adding more inventory and office space while maintaining the “original flavor” in the retail area. And while business has simmered down since the height of the pandemic, Stumptown has stayed busy.

“One thing that never changes is if it snows, you do well,” Joe said.

The Tabors said that even during economic hardships, Stumptown has been resilient, along with Board of Missoula and World Boards in Bozeman.

“We appreciate how the valley has supported us for 30 years and kept us here,” Kristin said. “There have been a lot of lean years when businesses didn’t stay around here, and the valley kept supporting us. There have been three core shops that have survived and that’s one thing that’s cool about Montana.”

For more information, visit www.stumptownsnowboards.com.