We all have our own definitions of success. As an observer, it would appear Nima Jalali has found it multiple times in a career that began as a professional snowboarder and transitioned into roles as a brand founder within snowboarding, before he embarked on a journey into the broader world of business, more specifically the sector categorized as “beauty,” with the brand Salt & Stone. If you ask Nima, money is not the first success metric he points to in his own definition. More than anything, it seems he’s driven by a desire to create legacy, true to his vision and taste.
It can’t be ignored, however, that Nima Jalali, a rider synonymous for many of us with a defining era in core snowboarding—one that provided Sunday in the Park edits, the People movies, Videograss, and Ashbury Eyewear—is now, objectively, one of the most financially successful snowboarders of all time. The 500-million-dollar sale of Salt & Stone made national headlines recently. But we’re not a business journal and you can read up on valuation and multiples elsewhere, so most of this conversation is focused on Nima as a person and a snowboarder. Whatever your definition of success, it feels good, or straight up inspiring, to see one of our own operating at Nima’s level.
Interview by Matt Norris and Taylor Boyd
Where did you start snowboarding and where did you grow up?
I grew up in La Cañada, which is a city right next to Pasadena. There were these two mom and pop ski resorts thirty minutes away. I grew up obsessed with skateboarding. There was this little snowboard scene at my high school, so naturally I started snowboarding and I fell in love with that. I would snowboard in the winters and skate in the summers.
What resort was that?
Mount Waterman. Then there was another resort called Kratka Ridge that burned down. Mount Waterman was actually for sale last year. There was a slide and it destroyed one of the lifts. I don't know if it'll ever get repaired again, which is such a bummer. It's such a special ski resort.
What was your first sponsor?
First sponsor was Atlantis, through a sales rep. The first real sponsor was when I moved to Utah, I got picked up by Sims. The first paycheck sponsor I think was M3.
Nice, was that an M3 board you rode in We’re People Too? That pink one?
You know what? It was an M4 board. So M3, Blaise [Rosenthal] had taken it over and he just changed it from M3 to M4 because I think somebody owned the trademark for snowboards for M3.
In my mind you were snowboarding’s Jim Greco. Was the Baker era an inspiration for you?
I would say Jim and I were inspired by the same things. We were both heavily inspired by rock and roll and early punk rock. I also loved watching Jim Greco skate and all the Baker stuff. I loved how they came through, doing things in a different way and not following rules. I just loved punk rock in general and the fact that all of a sudden skateboarding, this thing I loved, was incorporating all these punk bands and songs to these parts. So I was more heavily inspired by music in early punk. Like I loved the Ramones and the New York Dolls and Johnny Thunder. I still do to this day.
I remember when you did the switch back tail at Rail Gardens, which was insane because people weren’t really doing switch back tails at that time. What was your favorite clip that you ever filmed?
That one was pretty special to me. That's so cool that you remember that. I think I was maybe the first person to do that trick, even though it was on the Rail Gardens, and it was on the little rail, but I would say that stands out. And then there was the front board in Some Kind of Life through a kink rail that I just really liked the way it looked and the way it was filmed and everything. I think those two stand out.
I was going to bring up that front board next actually. That was the other one that always stood out to me because again, at that time, the only people I remember front boarding kink rails were you and Jon Kooley.
Yeah and JP Walker, right?
Oh yeah, JP for sure.
A front board to me was like the kickflip on a skateboard. It's like the thing that you just do over and over and over again. So it just felt so natural after a while. I love that you remember that.
But, I grew up jumping, I didn't grow up hitting rails. I moved to Mammoth for a bit, and I was riding with John Jackson and Matt Hammer and hitting like 80 foot park jumps, over and over again.
Was that a cab nine or a front nine in Some Kind of Life?
[Laughs] I always sucked at spinning frontside. It was definitely a cab nine.
In that era, you guys were leading the charge for the hesh vibe, which I was always super into. What was your involvement in Ashbury and how did that come about?
I started it with two partners. One was focused on marketing; the other was focused on design. So I kind of did everything else, as far as all the business stuff—you know, ordering from the factories and all that, but it also bled over into marketing. I definitely had a hand in creative direction with my partners.
Ashbury was the hottest shit when it came out. Everyone I knew was obsessed with getting it. Did you ever have any other companies you tried to start that didn't take off?
Nothing that didn't take off. Thankfully, Ashbury did well. Then I started Howl with Darrell Mathes, which I'm still a partner in.
When did you decide to start working more in the industry, and I guess bow out of filming video parts? Was that a conscious choice or did it just kind of happen?
I mean, it was a combination of two things. You wear on yourself mentally and physically when you're just going so hard at something, you know, I was nonstop. But then I had my first real injury. I had my ACL tear. And I remember the day after surgery, waking up and just being like, I can't move my leg. I don't know if it was the painkillers or whatever, but I had a surge of motivation. Like you have to start something that has no expiration date because as you get older, inevitably, your skills are going to decline. That was a little bit scary to me. The knee injury was the ultimate eye opener. I still love snowboarding and my mindset was if my knee gets back to one hundred percent, I still want to do it. But I could finally see past it, so I wanted to start something that's not limited by age that you can still do at a high level.
Do you still snowboard or is your knee fucked?
It’s good. I mean, I run five days a week, and I still snowboard, without any pain. I had three surgeries on the same knee and I ran this morning with no pain at all. So thankfully, it healed.
Ashbury feels like what I would call a disruptor brand. It seems like a lot of your career, you were in urban areas where more culture exists than in a mountain town where most snowboard brands are created. Can you talk a little about how you approached bringing something to those categories that felt different than what was available?
I never really thought about that. But I mean, I grew up ten minutes from downtown LA, you know. So maybe growing up in a big city where there's so much going on, maybe that does influence you. And being around the epicenter of the skateboard scene, right? In skateboarding you always had these people that were visionaries and you could kind of see ahead of trends and stuff. So I think being around that probably had something to do with starting a snowboard brand with a bit of a different approach. As far as Ashbury goes, it’s like, why isn't there a goggle brand that is cool or that actually had a whole team of people that we thought were cool, right? It just felt obvious, you know.
What do you think snowboarding understands about branding that bigger industries often struggle to understand?
I think skaters and snowboarders are just cooler than almost everybody else. We’re so influenced by everything, and you're out there in the streets or whatever, absorbing it all. And especially as a pro, you start thinking about how to market yourself—what to wear for your video part, what song to choose. All these things make skateboarders, snowboarders, and surfers, just cooler. And when you talk about what consumers want in a brand, consumers want cool.
Skateboarders have always been able to see a little bit ahead. And you see that with fashion, right? Like with the Baker guys, all of a sudden it was tight jeans. And then less than five years later, skinny jeans were a thing. So there's always that advantage that when they start something, they can see a little bit ahead.
That's so important with starting a brand, especially now with all the AI bullshit. AI can't see ahead. I think skaters and snowboarders with a vision will definitely have the advantage over people who are just taking on that AI approach.
Maybe there's something about authenticity in snowboarding and skating. It's truly about creativity and passion.
I mean, for sure passion. Right? Skateboarding raised me, that's where I learned, that was my school. That's where I learned about discipline and hard work paying off and putting in the reps. That applies to everything as you get older. In snowboarding, there were always people with great work ethic. Look at somebody like Jed Anderson. Of course he's a natural, and you see all the amazing things he's doing, but what you don't see is how hard he's working behind the scenes to make sure he's ready for when he starts to film. Then everyone's like, damn, that looks so easy. But you didn't see all the work put in all the years before. The same applies to business and building a brand. You can definitely build off that.
Of course, we’ve also seen a lot of core snow and skate brands struggle over the years. Where do you see the snow and skate industry getting things wrong on the business side?
This is a frustrating one for me because I want more than anything for snowboarding and skateboarding’s cool brands to be huge. What these people have created deserves to have a large amount of success. The work is just as hard as building another brand [in a different space]. But the snowboard industry goes in cycles, and unfortunately, you're at the mercy of bad snow years. I think that the industry is still alive and will grow. But you see brands that you think are amazing. They’re doing everything right and ahead of their time, but they're sort of a little bit limited by how big the industry can get.
Right. It's partially a matter of scale of consumer.
And it's like, not everything needs to be a hundred million dollar brand, you know, for it to be successful. It's all relative. If you can have a brand doing a few million dollars a year, and you don't have huge overhead, and you're making good profit, and you get to snowboard and you get to live that lifestyle, dude, I would choose that life ten times out of ten over a lot of the other options, you know, that sounds like a pretty successful life to me.
How lucky for somebody like Joe Sexton. He's always happiest when he's building something, it's not like you're doing it for money. I feel like Joe would pay to build his brand, you know, like he actually loves it. So there's a lot of happiness in that. And that's really what we're all after, right? It's not always about the money.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That transitions into creating a brand worth hundreds of millions. How did that happen?
It all leads back to the injury. I wanted to just heal as fast as possible, and be able to just be active again. So I got into health and wellness and I started really caring about nutrition and like what I was eating, what I was putting in my body. Then I started caring about what I was putting on my body. I was just shocked at some of these products.
We started with sunscreen, then we finally launched deodorant, which I thought was the biggest opportunity for a few reasons. Design wise, I never had a deodorant I actually wanted to put on the shelf. Every deodorant I bought was just something I would hide away. Scent wise, I never wanted to smell like any of the deodorants and especially the clean deodorants where it was just really simple scents like peppermint. I wanted to infuse this deodorant with sophisticated scents inspired by nature, that I actually wanted to smell like. Then performance, like the clean deodorants that were out there just didn't work for me. That's why it took so long. It proved to work to take time to develop a product that I felt like was in a perfect place.
Like when we talk about Ashbury, I was just looking for this product that didn't exist in the world. And I'm like, why does that not exist?
Do you feel like through Salt & Stone’s lifecycle to date the company has continued to embody your personal taste? Or do you feel like at some point it became bigger than that?
I think when you build a brand for commercial success, you should always have your taste to a certain degree, right? There’s an art to building a brand that is positioned for that commercial success. And then there's, you know, these brands that I see that are very cool that I'm a consumer of, but I just feel like they might be too cool to have that big commercial success and it might go over everyone's head. So I definitely have learned to be flexible with it. I'm not the only consumer, obviously. Around seventy percent of our consumers are female, you know. So it's like, how do you build a brand that speaks to everybody?
There are all some big numbers being thrown around online about your sale of Salt & Stone. Was it hard to sell off something that you built up? Are you still involved?
I'm still involved. I'm still the CEO, so it's still something I love. I want this brand to be something my grandkids know about, right? Not just this thing that was around and disappeared. I found the right partner who shared that same vision. We sell one deodorant every five seconds. We're the bestselling deodorant on Amazon entirely. We've built this really special brand, and my goal was to make this a household name and we did that. But there's a whole ‘nother phase to becoming that hundred-year brand. And you don't do that by yourself. Bringing these guys on, they have really great expertise. They've done it before. So I really felt like it was such a win-win.
Historically, some big non-endemic brands have seen value in snowboarding and invest ad dollars in it. Have you ever thought about that with Salt & Stone?
If you look at Salt & Stone, you're not going to see my face anywhere. I'm not using myself as marketing material as a founder and this ex-pro snowboarder type thing, right? I feel like I was a little insecure about starting the brand and thinking like, oh, this is like the Roxy or the Quiksilver of skincare? I just wanted to make sure that this didn't go in that direction. First, build that confidence, and then we can do cool stuff with snowboarding and skateboarding, which we're working on, but in a way that feels cool and it feels like we’re doing it in the right way. Not that we're going to go and start like a big skate team or something, but I love that we're in a place where we can have a campaign with a cool skater that will make sense and won't come off cheesy. Like when you see these big companies do something where it's like somebody mall grabbing their skateboard or something, they just don't understand it at all.
There's a pretty formulaic approach to CPG brand management, in my experience. And there's often a lot of MBAs in the room that come from these big conglomerates. Did you ever feel any imposter syndrome coming from a snowboard background and being in some of those rooms?
I mean, yes. I found myself in Sephora meetings and I'm not wearing a suit, you know, there's no way. I didn't work this hard to wear a suit. You know what I mean? [Laughs] I worked this hard because I didn't want to work for anybody. I don’t want anybody to tell me how to dress or what to look like. So I go to these Sephora meetings and I just look like a skater, you know. My head of sales next to me is looking sharp and awesome in his suit. At first the Sephora team was probably like, who is this skateboarder, you know? But I think I've just immersed myself in the industry to where it just feels normal now.
What would you say to a snowboarder or a skateboarder who has ideas outside of those industries but feels like they’re losing part of their identity doing that?
If you have an idea and you feel good about it, just go do it. I feel like a doer will always outperform a thinker. People like Joe Sexton are always doing, you know, they're doing cool stuff. So if you feel good about it, don't sit there and contemplate and all that. Just go for it if you can.
Is there anything in snowboarding recently that you've seen that gets you hyped?
You know who I really like? Forest Bailey and Tommy Gesme. When I watch them snowboard, I’m like, these guys are the Michael Jordans of snowboarding, they can just do anything. And they got crazy pop and control. It's so amazing to watch people with that kind of board control.
Then I have a five year old boy who loves to watch Marcus Kleveland. He’s just like a wizard on a snowboard.
Do you ever have any interest in being involved in snowboarding at another point in your life? Also, would you ever film another street trick?
[Laughs] Would I ever film another street trick? No. I was always mindful about not milking it and putting anything out in the universe that I wasn't proud of. I still love to snowboard, I love powder days. I never got enough powder days when I was a pro, you know? When there was fresh snow we would go build a jump.
Right now, I'm just focused on seeing this thing through, but there's possibly another chapter for me. And like I said, it's not always about money. So if something makes sense in the snowboard world, I definitely would consider it.