Since the beginning of time (or at least since the invention of plastic), ski boots have sucked.
Stiff, cold, tight, clunky, painful…sucked. But did you know there was actually a time when snowboard boots sucked too? Maybe even more?
“In those early days we would just cram ski-boot liners into our Sorels,*” explains Canadian snowboard legend Kevin Sansalone. “Then snowboard boots came out and they were so big and bulky and crappy that we were all trying to jam our feet into extra small boots. I guess I was about 17 when I first heard about Intuition.”
Conceived by a core Whistler backcountry skier named Byron Gracie, Intuition liners were the industry’s first heat-moldable boot liners. Gracie teamed up with two buddies, Herb Lang and Rob Watt, and the trio sourced a closed-cell foam (think of those old thin sleeping pads for camping) and designed a liner with a wrap-around shape rather than a tongue. The result, even early on, were new pinnacles of warmth, comfort, and foot-hugging responsiveness that worked for both skiers and snowboarders of the ’90s, a time when the two sports were definitely not on good terms.
“It was crazy,” Sansalone recalls. “We were snowboarders from North Van and a lot of people dissed us back then, especially in Whistler. We used to get into fights up there, but here I was, a kid really, going down into this gnarled old skier-dude’s basement to get this hot new thing that was gonna revolutionize our winter. It felt like we were going into a dungeon to see a wizard or something, scary and exciting at the same time. But the liners were super low-profile and warm. I loved them. Looking back at it, for this older generation of skiers to just open their doors and share their inventions with us…way back then. It was pretty cool.”
A couple of years into the Intuition origin story, Rob Watt bought out his partners and carried on the mad-scientist, hand-designed quest for the perfect liner. Sansalone remained a fan, and continued to give rider feedback over the next decade-plus when his boot sponsors at thirtytwo signed on to what would become Intuition’s longest-running partnership.
You might also like:
“I met Rob when I was two,” says Intuition president Crystal Maguire. “I was about 11 when he started Intuition, he lived upstairs from the basement suite my mom and I shared and I remember him cooking boot liners in the kitchen and carving feet and legs out of wood because he couldn’t find any lasts that went above the ankle. He used to carry around a tiny model skeleton of the foot that he would play with, just always trying to build a better boot liner.”
For Intuition, the early focus was making lightweight and warm liners that could custom mould to your feet but wouldn’t pack out over time. The design featured a single-seam and a wrap-around front that held the foot in the boot better than the customary tongue design. Ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) foam seemed to work best but finding the perfect density/mix was a challenge, especially as the ski industry began to realize Intuition was changing the game and began looking to bite their ideas.
“There is a lot of low-quality EVA out there,” explains Maguire, who apprenticed under Watt as a teenager, learning the practical, boot-fitting skills, then the business side, before eventually stepping in as president in October 2016. “And every foam acts differently, especially at different temperatures. Eventually we decided to just figure it out ourselves so we recruited an old chemist and spent the next five years perfecting the process. That foam is our rock—we need to be all in on that 100 per cent. Rob said, ‘I’ll make the perfect foam, even if it kills me.’”
It didn’t. Intuition has been rocking its own proprietary foam since 2013. Maguire even has a small bedroom in their factory in China to stay as close and hands-on to their product as possible. The market fluctuates, but these days Intuition is making 350-400,000 boot liners a year, though their proprietary foam is gaining interest from glove manufacturers, lacrosse padding companies, the Norwegian military, backpack makers, and a company that makes preventative and rehabilitative braces for injured horses, to name a few. But when it comes to their game-changing liners, this year the Intuition team is going back to their roots.
“The 30th-anniversary liners are all simplified,” explains Maguire, who still personally heat-fits dozens of liners a year for customers and professional athletes. “We took all the models that worked best over the past three decades and took everything apart, pulled out seams where we could, remixed it and now we are down from 33 models to 17. It’s nice to feel like we’re not starting from scratch. We’re a small, tight company and I like it that way—everyone is self-managing, we can adapt, make quick decisions. Rob calls it a ‘horizontal company,’ we don’t worry too much about titles. Pet-friendly, kid-friendly, party-friendly, West Coast vibes.”
Of the people, for the people. And while there’s no question Intuition has made ski boots suck less over the years, snowboard boots are definitely winning the comfort footrace. Which is where the Intuition après booties come in. More on those another time (but sliding into them after a day in ski boots is literally the best thing to happen to the sport since fat skis). Innovation never sleeps at Intuition (but it might come in a bit late on a pow day). –Feet Banks
* For American and overseas readers—pretty much every Canadian kid in the 1990s wore Sorels—a shin-high, nylon boot with a felt liner—as their everyday winter boot. Great for tobogganing in, but very floppy and unsupportive for snowboarding.
You might also like:
Check the ML Podcast!
