Snowboarding Tips, Fun Notes about Snowboard Destinations, and Snowboarding Stories

The new Burton store in Los Angeles (on Melrose)

Filed under: Snowboard Shop Reviews — Erica on January 17, 2008 @ 11:37 pm

Wow… that is about all I can say about this store! It is a triple threat - visually appealing layout, amazing merchandise, and a great staff.

(Pardon these pics, I didn’t have my digicam with me, these are Blackberry shots)

(the logo on the Melrose-facing front wall)

Apparently, it was built around Burton’s vision of becoming a “board sports” brand, not just a snowboarding brand. As part of that, they offer Channel Island surfboards as well as a huge wall of skateboards & skate stuff (I don’t know what brand they were…)

Burton store - skate wall

(the skateboard wall as seen from the street)

The store is huge (10k square feet +) and takes up the entire street corner it occupies. Two huge garage doors open onto the sidewalks, each showing the display of snowboards and surfboards which line a mock half-pipe made of what looks like bamboo hardwood. It’s a really stunning display. There is a huge selection of Burton snowboards - they even had the limited-edition Andy Warhol boards out. Yup, even had the one with the Velvet Underground album-cover banana - that was pretty sick.

Burton snowboards at the Burton store in Los Angeles

(view of the snowboard section display)

The store is laid out around the skate/snow/surf themes, with each section devoted about one-half to hardgoods and the other half or more to the clothing. Seems like obviously the biggest area was still the snowboarding stuff, of course. For me that meant a big ladies section of Burton shells & snowboard pants to peruse. The selection is impressive. Every color you could imagine of pant, and jackets to match, and within each color family there is another set of decisions - cuz there’s a range of prices and options! If I was buying a whole new outfit I’d be in there for hours, thank god I already decided on a pant color to buy.

Lots of different bindings to choose from, and the sales floor staff is really friendly and knowledgeable about the products. Helping to steer me to a nearly $200 pair of new Lexa Snowboard Bindings … ah, what the heck. They’re gonna be great!

There’s a HUGE wall of ANON goggles, many with cute fashion materials on the frames, such as denim, leather, or snakeskin. The choices were really mind-boggling.

They also have fleece, t-shirts (you know I love me some quirky t-shirts and they had some really cute ones made with a blow-up image of puppy dogs and bunnies from those 70s inspirational posters…), a wide selection of beanies, a fair amount of boots (they had both the Speed Zone quick-lace ones, as well as more traditional lace-ups), and sunglasses. In the mens section they were sporting the 80s-throwback Burton stuff which Jonny at SouthoftheNorth mentioned in his blog recently.

I didn’t check out too much in the surf or skate area, but will be back to explore more.

Front window of the Burton snowboarding store in Los Angeles

I ended up with a new pair of these white women’s Burton Lexa Snowboard Bindings:

and a pair of Burton Stow cargo pants in the “rock salt” color.

(Can’t wait to try the bindings this weekend in Mammoth!)

Extra kudos goes to Paul and Pat, two of the awesome team members that helped me make my choices and depart with my cash! Oh Burton store, I and my credit card will be back!

Rating breakdown (scale of 1-5, 5 is excellent)