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The question came up recently about Burton and their acquisition of Forum / Jeenyus, and if they could work that into marketing a brand to the non-freestyle rider. It would be really, really tough in this circumstance. Forum is an extremely freestyle oriented brand, perhaps the leader of the freestyle movement. Jeenyus was spun off of Forum in an attempt to bring in the hard-core freestyler who wants an even more underground image. Moving either of those two brands away from freestyle would kill them. People like me won't think of looking to those brands for freeride gear. And they'd lose their old target market if they did. So, could the Big B move away from freestyle and back to their roots as a freeride company? Perhaps... but it would be risky for the biggest manufacturer to abandon the flashiest market. Perhaps they should... they've been diluting their brand a lot lately, and going through cost cutting measures. Does someone with some good knowledge of the other brands know what K2 has done. Now that they have K2, Liquid, Ride, 5150, and Morrow... it seems like they should be able to market their label to different groups pretty easily. Have they? I know next to nothing about any of those brands. My knowledge consists mainly of reading the mags, the local companies (Burton and Rome), and the little freeride oriented guys (Prior, Catek, Arbor, etc). -- Jason - "redraobwons" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SkiVt-L is brought to you by the University of Vermont. To unsubscribe, visit http://list.uvm.edu/archives/skivt-l.html