Key Takeaways:
- Jennifer Valentine leads merchandising at Burton Snowboards after nearly 19 years at Adidas.
- Valentine is guiding Burton through its 50th anniversary, pulling from decades of archives while planning where the sport goes next.
- She points to taking on an unfamiliar sales role as the career risk that has paid off most.
Jennifer Valentine came to Burton Snowboards after nearly 19 years at Adidas, drawn by the ability to see her direct impact on the business and move at a pace a large organization can’t match.
This year, that means leading merchandising through Burton’s 50th anniversary, a season built around both the riders who shaped the sport and where it’s headed next.
Valentine talked with Shop Eat Surf Outdoor about her career path, leadership lessons, and what’s exciting her most right now.
You started your career as a healthcare consultant before pivoting to sporting goods. What made you walk away from that path, and do you ever think about the road not taken?
Jennifer Valentine, Chief Merchandising Officer at Burton Snowboards:Â No regrets. I love this industry, and it’s why I’ve never really looked back. Consulting was a great training ground for balancing qualitative insight, the art, with quantitative data, the science.
But my heart was always in sport and the outdoors, and merchandising let me carry that same art-and-science thinking forward with one important difference. In consulting, I made recommendations. Now I get to act on them and own the outcome, good or bad.
What made Burton the right next move after nearly 19 years at Adidas, and what lessons did you bring with you?
Jennifer Valentine:Â Burton is small and privately held, which means you can see your direct impact on the business and move at a pace a large organization simply can’t match. That was the draw.
I brought three lessons with me from Adidas:
The most valuable: you scale a business by leaning into where sport and culture overlap, not by choosing one over the other.
The second: a go-to-market plan is only as strong as its resonance with the consumer.
The third: communication and collaboration are critical in leadership. You can have the right strategy, but if you can’t bring team members across multiple functions along with you, it won’t be executed with excellence.
What is an underrated skill merchandising leaders need today?
Jennifer Valentine:Â Balancing conviction with agility! Our consumers are not one thing, and their needs are more fluid than they have ever been.
A merchant who builds a range against a fixed definition of the consumer will be wrong within a season. The underrated skill is holding your assumptions loosely enough to adjust without losing conviction about where you are taking the brand and category.
What’s a leadership belief you held early in your career that you’ve since reversed?
Jennifer Valentine: I believed that I could state clear goals for a project and people would adopt them immediately. I missed bringing in key stakeholders to get input and buy-in as well as aligning with cross-functional leaders prior to rolling out to the core team.
Just because you have the title or set a direction, doesn’t mean people will automatically follow you.
What career risk has paid off the most for you?
Jennifer Valentine:Â Taking on a team in a function I had never worked in. I led a sales team, without sales experience, on one of our largest accounts. It was a steep learning curve, and it tested my self-belief.
What got me through was learning fast, asking questions, and leaning on the team’s expertise. I didn’t pretend to have all the answers and was honest about what I didn’t know. This experience gave me the confidence to take on unfamiliar roles, and it’s what opened the door to leading Adidas soccer in North America.
It still pays off now. It makes me a far better partner to our wholesale team, because I understand firsthand what it takes to work with, and succeed with, account partners.
What’s a brand outside of the snow and outdoor space you study closely, and why?
Jennifer Valentine:Â Netflix. It’s inspiring to watch a company continually reinvent itself to compete and win. Netflix has evolved the marketplace several times over, from a mail-based subscription service, to streaming, to international expansion, and now live streaming events.
Right now, it’s exciting to see Netflix take on more established sports media broadcasters, with the MLB Field of Dreams game and the Women’s FIFA World Cup next year, among others.
What are you working on right now that excites you most?
Jennifer Valentine:Â Burton’s 50th anniversary, hands down. This year is about celebrating the riders who built and are building this sport as much as it’s about the brand itself. We’re pulling from 50 years of archives and stories, but we’re just as focused on where the sport goes next.
Getting to sit at that intersection of legacy and future, and being a part of the next chapter, really excites me. We have a full season planned so I would encourage everyone to check our website for more info on how we’re celebrating our 50th.
