Made in North Carolina: An Interview With Brackish Founder Lynwood Cherry

It kind of made the—it made the brand more serious, and ended up helping sell more apparel and everything else. It helped that the boards were really good. And so that's how, that's how that kind of started.

From there, we just tried to make boards as we can. It's a small brand, and about five or six years in, I decided to stop trying to keep up with the industry and its time schedule. And so we operate when we want to operate.

I've seen you in in shops in North Carolina, but are you distributing, like, kind of all over the south or all over the country?

We’ve actually scaled back now, which hasn't necessarily hurt the brand. We were even sold in Japan at one time, and it was going really big, and it was it just was too much of a time investment for me with a family and everything. So we scaled back and kind of went to our roots of just focusing on the southeast.

There are just some amazing shops in the southeast. You got, like, Edge of the World, of course, has been our biggest supporter. Pluto Sports in Knoxville is great. And of course, Recess supported us when we first got started.

I think a lot of people don't understand, like, the love snowboarding that the southeast has, and that's just really helped. I mean, the customers here have just kept us alive.

What is something you'd like the general public to kind of know about the scene here in North Carolina?

I think the—for me—the style of our mountains is like, we don't get the best weather, we don't have the best snow, but all the mountains like Beech and Sugar and App and Snowshoe, people work really hard to run these mountains, but I think it gives us this like taste of snowboarding that makes people extremely passionate about snowboarding and just want to keep going again and again.
 
And I think it's—we're really fortunate, even though our mountains and seasons are short, to have that here, to kind of spark that love of snowboarding for people. If you look at the riders that have come out of North Carolina through the past 30 years, we've had some pretty heavy hitters come out of North Carolina.

How did the collaboration with Edge of the World kind of come about?

So Edge of the World (in Banner Elk, North Carolina) was the first shop that carried like a face wrap we made in 2008. I worked at Edge of the World after college for a season there. When I was a kid, it got me into snowboarding, you know, as a teenager in the 1990s.

It's just always been, in my opinion, probably the best shop in the country. They promote snowboarding. They’ve got the best stuff. It's really an incredible place. And (shop owner Jeff Johnson), we've grown up with each other for a while now, since the college years. There’s a lot of pride with that collab.

You have a directional, powder-style board on your website for under $400. That’s almost unheard of. Is that part of the brand’s mission, to get people on affordable boards?

So, it is. But it's also to just move product and get (our name) out there.

That board is, in my opinion, one of the best constructed directional boards on the market. The retail price should be like $700 or so, but it just helps us sell it. Being a smaller brand, if I put that price tag on it, it just won't sell. Whereas another larger brand that's made in China or somewhere, that's not even as quality of a board, they'll sell it, but they have the marketing behind it.
 
And so I just want to get people on it and get it out there. And, you know, there's a lot of things I could factor into the price of the boards that I just don't include. Which would be, like, my time. But we don’t have a lot of overhead. So it’s 100% a labor of love.