From one kid to a generation

Words by Alba Pardo

MDX ONE didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a three-year-old on a snowboard, a dad trying to stop him from catching an edge, and a family discovering that winter could bring them together. Thirteen years later, that homemade solution has grown into a brand built around one deceptively simple idea: kids don’t have to learn to ski before they can snowboard.

When Maddox Matte was two, his parents put him on skis. It didn’t go particularly well. A year later, his dad Sylvain tried a snowboard instead. “That changed everything,” he remembers.

Sylvain already knew snowboarding. He had started riding in the 1990s and spent a couple of seasons working as an instructor, but by the time Maddox was born, it had largely disappeared from his life. Originally from Quebec, Sylvain was now living with Wendy in Ontario, where access to good riding was more limited, and he had become increasingly obsessed with kiteboarding instead.

Wendy, originally from El Salvador, had even less attachment to winter. Sylvain had taught her to snowboard, but she describes those early attempts as little more than sideslipping down the mountain. Then Maddox started riding. “I saw the fun that they were having and I was like, ‘No, I want to be part of that,’” she says. Suddenly snowboarding wasn’t simply Sylvain’s sport anymore. It was family time.

The problem was that teaching a three-year-old to snowboard could be chaotic. Sylvain wanted Maddox to have enough freedom to discover the board himself, while still being able to catch him before a toe edge did. Drawing partly from the harnesses and bungees he knew through kiteboarding, he began improvising.

The earliest version was exactly as homemade as you might imagine. Sylvain bought the smallest backpack he could find, cut holes into it, and took it to his local shoe-repair guy to help stitch everything together. Eventually he worked with a bag designer in Quebec City to turn the experiment into a proper prototype. And it worked.

And once it did, Sylvain had another thought: if I don’t do something with this, somebody else will. Neither he nor Wendy had built a business before. Both came from sales, and they had no snowboard-industry contacts beyond Sylvain’s own background as an instructor. Still, Sylvain took the prototype to the Canadian Association of Snowboard Instructors. The response was encouraging enough for them to keep going, and in 2013 MDX ONE officially became a company. What followed was considerably less straightforward.

At the beginning, Sylvain remembers feeling like he was almost begging people to try the product. A hundred-dollar snowboard teaching harness was a difficult sell when shops already carried much cheaper ski harnesses, and explaining why the two were different was not always easy.

The snowboard-specific system used a full-body harness, a handle and a retractable leash with different attachment points, allowing a parent to control speed without permanently towing the child. The idea was to provide support and safety while gradually removing it as the kid became more independent. But first they had to convince people there was a problem worth solving.

“There was no demand for your product,” Sylvain remembers retailers saying. “And I was like, ‘Well, I know there’s no demand. It’s a new product.’” For roughly five years, he worked two jobs while MDX ONE grew on the side. Quebec retailers began taking a chance on it, online sales spread largely through word of mouth, and social media slowly became one of the company’s most important tools.

Rather than filling Instagram with product advertising, Wendy says they focused on the thing that had made them start the company in the first place: kids laughing on snowboards, parents riding with them and families figuring it out together. MDX ONE had arrived as the first generation of lifelong snowboarders was beginning to have children of its own.

For decades, conventional wisdom had told parents that small children should learn to ski first and switch to snowboarding later. MDX ONE was questioning the assumption entirely. “If you’re a snowboarder, there’s zero reason why you should start your kid on skis,” Sylvain says.

It is an intentionally partisan position, delivered with a laugh, but there is some logic behind it. Put a child on skis until they are seven or eight, and they may have little interest in becoming a beginner again on a snowboard. Give snowboarder parents better tools for those difficult first days, and perhaps more of them will simply start where they eventually want their children to end up.

The idea gained an important boost when Marko “Grilo” Grilc began using the MDX ONE harness with his daughter Emma. At first the family had no existing relationship with MDX ONE; Sylvain and Wendy simply began seeing one of Europe’s best-known snowboarders using their product online. For a tiny company, the effect was considerable.

Grilo helped demonstrate that starting young on a snowboard wasn’t just possible; it could be fun. MDX ONE later worked with his wife Nina on the Grilo Pack, both as a tribute to him and as a continuation of the family snowboarding message he had helped spread.

By then, another significant relationship was developing. In 2020, Burton contacted MDX ONE about collaborating on the harness. For Sylvain and Wendy, who had spent years wondering whether a much larger company might simply create its own version, the call felt like validation. “They basically said, ‘Why are we going to make our own when you guys are already making it and it works?’” Wendy recalls.

During the pandemic, Sylvain developed a children’s book around MDX ONE’s Pull, Walk, Ride teaching method. Illustrated by family friend John McTavish, it turns learning to snowboard into a story kids can understand before they even reach the hill. Characters from the book became toys; colouring pages followed. What began as a piece of equipment was slowly turning into an entire introduction to snowboarding.

Now MDX ONE is completing the circle with the product people have been asking them for almost since the beginning: its own snowboard.

The new kids’ board, with artwork again created by McTavish, will be offered alongside bindings and the original harness as a complete learning package. Rather than expanding into adult boards or trying to become another full-line snowboard manufacturer, Sylvain says the intention is to remain stubbornly focused on young kids.

That focus makes more sense when you remember where all of this came from. Maddox is 18 now. The three-year-old his dad once chased down beginner slopes grew into a highly technical rail rider who last season won the Red Bull Heavy Metal in Montreal. These days he naturally spends more time riding with friends than with his parents, although Wendy is quick to point out that he still takes laps with them.

For Sylvain, those early years remain some of his favourite memories. “I think from three to six was the best time,” he says. “It was just so much fun.” There is something fitting about the fact that the company carrying Maddox’s name is now trying to give other families more of exactly that.

MDX ONE may sell harnesses, books, and now snowboards, but its real product has always been a little harder to package: making those first winters easier enough that a family wants to come back for another one.