CAPiTA and Union have been sold.
More accurately, a majority stake in the group behind both brands has been bought by Italian private equity firm Wise Equity. Blue Montgomery and Martino Fumagalli haven’t disappeared, Fumagalli is staying in charge, and the people already running the companies are reinvesting alongside the new owner.
So no, Union bindings aren’t suddenly going to fall apart and CAPiTA isn’t about to start pressing snowboards out of old cereal boxes (though some of you will argue that might be an improvement).
But I’d be lying if I said I loved it.
I’ve been snowboarding for decades now and I’ve watched a ridiculous number of brands disappear, get swallowed up or slowly turn into something completely different. Years ago they often just died. It sucked, but at least you knew they were dead.
More recently, good snowboard brands seem more likely to get bought.
The logo survives. The name survives. Sometimes the products barely change at first. The average amateur riders is often none the wiser…
Almost inevitably though, prices rise and quality falls. That’s what happens when you try to squeeze out every drop of shareholder value from an established product. Fuckers.
Why This One Sucks
CAPiTA and Union matter because they’ve always felt like snowboard brands rather than companies that happen to sell snowboards. There’s a difference. They’ve built teams, made films, backed riders, made weird shit and developed products because people inside those companies actually give a shit about snowboarding.
Now the majority owner is an investment fund whose job, ultimately, is to make money from the investment.
That doesn’t automatically ruin anything. But pretending it changes nothing is equally stupid.
What Actually Happened?
Wise Equity announced in May 2026 that it was acquiring a majority stake in CORE S.r.l. and C3 Worldwide LLC, the companies behind Union Binding Company and CAPiTA Snowboards.
Union co-founder Martino Fumagalli, CAPiTA founder Blue Montgomery and Claudia Scortaioli are all reinvesting in the business, and Fumagalli is staying on.
That is a much better situation than a straight sale where the founders cash out and disappear.
CORE is also not some distressed company being rescued. The group reportedly did around €50 million in revenue in 2025, with more than 95% coming from international markets and “EBITDA” margins above 25% (I realise I’m sounding dangerously close to an investment guru here).
Wise Equity has talked about international expansion, growing Union boots, product development and pushing harder into markets such as China.
In plain English… they’ve bought a profitable snowboard business because they think it can make more money.
Fair enough. That is what private equity does.
Why Should We Care?
If some giant investment fund bought a dishwasher company tomorrow, I genuinely couldn’t care less.
Snowboard brands are different.
Most of us have weird attachments to them.
You remember the board you desperately wanted when you were 15. You remember certain team videos. You remember riders associated with particular brands. Some graphics are burned into your brain despite the fact you haven’t seen them for 20 years.
Brands didn’t just sell us boards. They funded the culture around them.
That’s why the CAPiTA and Union news immediately turned into a much wider argument about who owns snowboarding.
And once you actually look at it, the answer is – far fewer independent companies than you probably think.
Salomon and Armada sit under Amer Sports. K2 and Ride belong to a much bigger corporate group. Arbor sits within Kent Outdoors. Rossignol has private equity backing. Volcom, DC, Billabong and Roxy are part of the enormous Authentic Brands Group portfolio.
Mervin has been through multiple owners too. Quiksilver owned it before selling it to Altamont Capital in 2013. At the time Mervin said it would continue operating independently and keep production in Washington.
And now CAPiTA and Union join that world. None of that means those companies suddenly make bad gear. But it’s certainly a risk.
Does Private Equity Guarantee Brand Destruction?
There are fantastic snowboards being made by huge companies. There are terrible snowboards made by tiny companies.
I try to avoid blind product loyalty based on the brand story and ethos (though I much prefer supporting snowboarder-owned brands whenever possible).
What worries people is that the thing which makes a snowboard company great is not always the same thing that makes an investment perform well.
A good snowboard company sometimes does stupid things…
It makes a board that hardly anyone will buy because somebody inside the company thinks it’s sick.
It keeps a rider on the team who isn’t shifting thousands of units but matters to the scene.
It spends a stupid amount of money making a snowboard film.
It backs an event that has very little upside (other than stoke and community).
It supports a local shop. Which we all should.
It keeps an expensive bit of construction because the cheaper version just doesn’t ride quite as well.
None of that makes sense when you reduce a company to margins and return on capital. And to be clear, I am not saying Wise Equity is about to gut CAPiTA… But shareholder value and making better snowboards are not always the same goal.
We’ve seen this all before
Anyone who’s been around snowboarding long enough has watched brands lose themselves.
A company gets bought. A few key people leave. The lineup gets smaller. A few years later you look at the same logo and realise the brand underneath it isn’t really the one you remember.
That doesn’t happen every time. Mervin is actually a pretty decent example of the opposite argument.
Lib Tech still makes some of the strangest mainstream snowboards around. GNU still exists. Mervin still manufactures boards in Washington. Magne-Traction didn’t disappear because an accountant discovered straight edges were cheaper (which they almost definitely are).
So outside ownership does not automatically kill snowboard culture. But it would also be naive to pretend ownership never matters.
The YES Snowboards Example
The timing of this is pretty funny because YES has basically just done an Uno reverse.
YES spent years under the Nidecker Group umbrella, then announced it would separate and return to majority ownership by founders Romain De Marchi and JP Solberg. From April 2026 it went back to being a standalone business.
Sounds like a fairytale right? Riders take back the brand. Fuck the corporations. Everyone goes snowboarding.
Except real life is so much messier…
YES had to absolutely hammer its product range. Seemingly their board lineup will be dropping from 24 models for 2026 to 13 for 2027. The bindings lineup was cut heavily too.
Not the YES guy’s fault. Independence obviously costs money. If getting control of your company back means killing half the catalogue, focusing on the boards people actually buy and running a tighter business, that might be exactly the right thing to do.
Better that than maintaining a bloated range because some parent company wants every conceivable category covered.
It also destroys the easy narrative that small independent snowboard brands get to make endless passion projects while big companies only care about margins. Everybody has to make money eventually.
The Independent Brands
This isn’t a funeral for snowboard independence. Yet.
There are still loads of companies doing their own thing.
Nitro. Never Summer. Academy. Dinosaurs Will Die. Korua. Cardiff. Wired. Amplid. Dupraz. Kindred.
Nidecker is also privately held, but it has become a substantial snowboard group itself. Jones, Bataleon, Rome and ThirtyTwo all sit within that wider world.
And I love me some Rome Katana’s and 32 TM-Two boots.
Which is exactly why trying to divide the entire snowboard industry neatly into GOOD INDEPENDENT BRANDS and BAD CORPORATE BRANDS is pointless.
The ownership structures are too complicated and, more importantly, the products still need judging on their own merits.
So should you stop buying CAPiTA and Union?
No.
At least I won’t.
If CAPiTA makes the best board for what I want to ride, I’ll still ride it.
If Union keeps making excellent bindings (Atlas Pro’s especially), I’ll still recommend them.
It would be ridiculous to punish the people currently working at those companies for decisions that haven’t even happened yet.
But I’m also not going to pretend I don’t care who owns them.
If I’ve got two equally good options and one of them comes from a genuinely independent snowboard company that pumps money back into riders and snowboarding, that matters to me.
Maybe it matters to you too?
I think it should.
That’s not just me on some high-horse white-knight syndrome either. It’s recognising that where snowboarders spend money has consequences.
We all say we love independent shops, then save $15 buying something online. Do that enough times and eventually there isn’t an independent shop. Brands aren’t much different.
What matters now
I don’t particularly care what the acquisition press release says. Obviously Wise Equity is going to talk about growth, innovation and supporting management.
Nobody buys a snowboard company and announces…
“We’re going to extract as much money as possible and make it slightly shitter every year.”
What matters is what CAPiTA and Union look like in a few years. If the same people are there, the products are still excellent, CAPiTA still invests in R&D, Union still backs snowboarding properly and the extra investment lets them do more of it, then great.
But if the range gets safer, the people disappear, quality slips and everything starts feeling like it was designed by a committee, nobody should be particularly surprised either.
We’ll know when we see it. Snowboarders are quite good at sniffing this stuff out.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been ranting now for about 4 beers, which equates to the best part of an hour. But I guess this is what I’m getting at… Snowboarding wasn’t built by people making sensible financial decisions. Quite the opposite.
It was built by idiots (like me) starting snowboard companies when hardly anybody snowboarded.
By brands throwing money at films that they then gave away.
By riders convincing companies to make strange boards that barely sold.
By shops carrying ridiculous products because the guy behind the counter (again, like me) thought they were cool.
By companies supporting scenes, magazines, contests and riders that probably returned absolutely fuck all on the profit side of a balance sheet.
A lot of that made terrible business sense.
It also made snowboarding what it is.
So while I don’t think private equity automatically destroys snowboard companies. And I don’t think CAPiTA and Union are (completely) fucked. I do think the snowboard industry gets a little less interesting every time another genuinely independent company is “acquired”.
Hopefully CAPiTA and Union are different.
I’d much rather still be riding and recommending both in ten years than writing some smug follow-up about how everyone here saw it coming.
But until then, support the good independent brands when you can.
