Industry Step-In: ROME SDS

Having a blog is easy, keeping it updated is hard. Being a Bikini Inspector is not the most rewarding job, but occasionally I get to travel, and sometimes those travels take me to shred mecca’s like Waterbury, Vermont. This past weekend (Thanksgiving), I happened to be in Waterbury to judge the Waterbury Junior College Bikini Bake-Off, and while there I thought I would stop into ROME SDS Headquarters and see whats up.

Owner and founder Donald Rome is apparently a huge stail tale’s fan, so he was more than happy to sit down, and answer a few hard hitting questions. As much of an enigma as a man, taking the time to read this interview with Don could be the most effective use of you time since you book-marked malakye.com

R. Wammybar: Hey Don, hows it bro?
Donald Rome: Fine.

Uh, cool. Ill just get right into this I guess, when and why did you start ROME SDS?
May 6th, 2001 we officially became a snowboarding company. Basically I had just sold my hovercraft business on Cape Cod (MA) and had some money I wanted to start a snowboard company with. A few friends of mine had just left Burton Snowboards, and we pretty much just decided to drop in.

Burton guys ay? What did they do their?
Well, as you might remember, 2001 was the beginning of the end of the step-in binding era. My friends had been the project managers for the Burton SI system, and when the big wigs up in Burlington decided to cut the program, they jumped ship. Both share an intense passion for boardsports, and their passion ran especially deep for step-in bindings. Originally Rome was going to do only Step-In bindings, we thought we could dominate the market, but after a few botched prototypes and some market research, we just sold all our tech to FLOW and focused on snowboards.

Woah baby, that’s cool. I would still wear step-ins today if I could find them
Yeah, same.

I was joking…
Me too (wink*)

While on the topic of Burton, tell me a little bit about your “This is Snowboarding” promotion
Well, because of snowboarding a lot of things have changed in all of our lives. It means something different to everyone and we wanted to give people the chance to speak out, and let us know what it (snowboarding) means to them.

Cool idea, sounds familiar… Tell me about your powder sucks ad, that was pretty dope
Yeah thanks. Really with that one we just didn’t have a lot of money to put into creative, and that step-child board is pretty neat, so we just stole the idea. No big deal though, right?

Word. Well cool man, thanks for taking the time to do this
No problem bro, keep up the good work. Staletail.blogspot.com is for sure my second favorite site, after the ROME one of course! PEACE!