Thirty-seven winters of sawdust, epoxy and very cold coffee.
Marisol Vega, a cabinetmaker's daughter, and Dean Whitlock, a ski patroller who couldn't stop tinkering, rented a drafty sawmill shed and pressed their first snowboard in a plywood mold with a bag of epoxy and a pile of borrowed clamps.
They called the company Tango because it took two people to build every board. The first run was eleven boards. They sold nine out of the back of a truck by Christmas and rode the other two into the ground.
With a battered 1978 pickup and a hand-painted banner, the crew spent a winter driving to fourteen Pacific Northwest resorts, letting anyone who wanted to demo a board. They came home with four hundred orders and a very smelly cab.
The Milonga, still our best-selling board, was born on that tour out of a hundred small notes scribbled on lift tickets.
We added a carbon stringer to the Milonga for snap without the chatter, and Rosa Delgado, one of our first hires, shaped the Habanera, a women's board designed with riders who had spent years on boards sized down from the men's line.
It sold out in nine days, and we've never made a board since without asking the question: who is this really for?
We moved into a proper building with a solar roof, a dust-collection system that doesn't put sawdust in everyone's hair, and room for the whole crew to stand at the same bench. Twenty-two people now work here.
We still cap every run at sixty boards. Small batches mean better quality control, nothing sitting in a warehouse and no pressure to cut corners.
Today the line is five boards, a pair of bindings and a few things to wear to the lodge. We pledge one percent of every Tanguito youth board to kids' lift ticket programs, and we repair any Tango board we can, whatever its age.
Thirty-seven winters in, we still believe the best snowboard is the one you ride until you wear it out.
We sponsor riders of every kind, from park rats to backcountry lifers. Show us what you've got.