DENVER — Building and creating handmade powder surfers is a passion for two Metropolitan State University of Denver students.
Quinn Aiello and Chris Hagenau first met in an industrial design class, and since then, their friendship has grown into becoming business partners.
"He would see what I was doing and got interested enough that he wanted to kind of make his own and give it a shot and from there. That was kind of when the partnership really started to grow is when he started building his own board, and I was kind of helping him along in the design process," Aiello said.
Aiello founded Kamber Labs in 2021, inspired to create a product with his own hands. With his father being a sculptor and fabricator, Aiello said his earliest memories included learning how to weld.
"It was never a question of what I was going to do. It's kind of like I was going to work with my hands and having someone who did foster those skills and knew so much that every time I worked with him, I felt like I was learning and getting better at what I did," Aiello said.
Unlike a traditional snowboard, these boards do not have bindings, meaning a rider can step right on it without buckling in. Currently, they have three different models, including the klassic, the karver, and the kommander. The boards vary in design and shape of the tail, which give customers different options for navigating the snow.
"That's really one of the markets we're like trying to push it towards is getting people out there that... don't have snowboards or maybe they've never tried it before and for them, this product is something that they can easily take and go out and enjoy," Aiello explained.
Part of the fun for these two is making the boards by hand.
"We've calculated it out to be about eight hours to make a board, and that varies depending on how fast we're working and whether we've come up with solutions for manufacturing problems. So that time has diminished over time as we become more skilled with what we're doing and understand it a little bit better," Hagenau said.
The two were determined to get their boards into a store and visited various shops in different locations before meeting Malachi Smith, the snowboard category buyer for BC Surf & Sport.
"I think snowboarding in general has kind of gone so mainstream and so commercial that to be able to partner with local guys that are obviously very passion driven and part of the community out here means a lot because snowboarding really is the community," explained Smith. "I think it's given a lot of us purpose in life and kind of like our driving passion, so any chance I have to support the local community specifically is awesome."
These hand-crafted boards stand out among the other products at the Lone Tree store location.
"We've actually sold a couple of boards from Kamber Labs. The interest is there. It's definitely a conversation starter when people walk in, and they want to know what it is. They want to know where it comes from, and it's really cool to be able to tell them that it's a local product from these guys," Smith said.
Moving forward, Kamber Labs hopes to inspire others to get outdoors and discover the thrill of riding on the snow through their product.
"It's just really cool to see how unique our powder surfers are because all these bigger companies are kind of circling around to creating powder surfers again, and like the Burton boards, the nitro boards, and like, all of those powder surfers are still very different from what we create," explained Hagenau. "Ours give you kind of that handcrafted touch that you don't really get with other ones."
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