KnutEliassen

The Long Way Up The Chairlift

There is a particular kind of executive who talks about "the community" from behind a laptop in a building where nobody has ever been cold. Knut Eliassen is not that executive, largely because he keeps ruining the illusion by going outside. He is the Chief Marketing Officer of Nitro Snowboards, a title that arrived in March 2025 and sounds impressively corporate until you learn that the same man once let a Finnish professional kick him in the head off a jump, on camera, for a laugh.

His origin story has the geographic confusion of a customs form. His father is from northern Norway. His mother is from Minnesota. He was born in Minneapolis and stayed in America until he was sixteen, at which point his father relocated the family to Norway on the grounds - and this is Eliassen's own retelling - that he "wanted to show us kids that there is more to the world than middle America." Few parents have ever been so thoroughly vindicated by a résumé.

Before the move, there was the hill. Minnesota is not a place blessed with vertical drop, and Eliassen's home mountain had no park, so for the first two years he and his friends built their own jumps. It is the sort of detail that would be inserted by a marketing department if it were not, inconveniently, true. He then discovered the USASA contest circuit, which had the twin advantages of letting him travel around the state and letting him ride parks somebody else had built. He entered boardercross because at the time it was essentially slopestyle with elbows: "You would race but do tricks on all the jumps on your way down." He was good enough to become USASA National Champion in the fifteen-year-old bracket.

"I thought I was hot shit," he later admitted. The universe, ever attentive to such statements, immediately moved him to Norway.

Norway, And The Decision

In Norway he did what any sensible teenager would do with a fresh continent: he moved out of his parents' house and in with the snowboarders JP and Stian Solberg. That, he says, is when he really got into snowboarding and worked out that this was what he wanted to do. It is worth noting that he did not therefore stop doing anything else. He enrolled at Handelshoyskolen BI, the Norwegian business school, and studied business and project management between 2005 and 2010 while riding professionally for Nitro. He paid his bills. He did not dodge his landlord. Both facts are, in the annals of professional snowboarding, mildly revolutionary.

He is careful not to oversell the glamour. He was, by his description, "a regular business student who was able to travel all around the world with rockstars." One suspects most business students would take that deal without reading the contract.

From The Team To The Team Van

Around 2012 he crossed the invisible line that separates the people in the video from the people who make sure the video happens. He became Nitro's team manager and moved from Norway to Salt Lake City - a city he recommends chiefly on the grounds that "you can snowboard all day and then skate at night," which is the sort of civic endorsement no tourism board could improve upon.

The job, as he described it, was a small act of logistics disguised as a lifestyle. Awake at six. Coffee. Clear the overnight European emails by nine. Down to the warehouse to handle social media and post product out to riders. Then, weather permitting, up to Park City if the sun was out or Brighton if it had snowed, ostensibly to film the team and in practice to end up riding himself. Back to the desk. Work until seven. Then the dog, the skateboard, the evening.

What is quietly interesting is how deliberately he kept the riding in. "The reason I work in snowboarding is because I love snowboarding," he said, "so I'll always do whatever I can to go out and board. This keeps me true to the sport and in good contact with what is going on at the hill - which is important because that's where our customers are." And then the line that ought to be printed and pinned above every marketing department in the world: "I always try to take the chair with kids so I can ask them questions and find out what they are into."

No panel. No survey instrument. Just seven minutes, a stranger, and a chairlift that does not let either of you leave.

Hiring For Character, Not Corks

As team manager he was responsible for choosing who represented one of snowboarding's older brands, and his criteria were refreshingly unbothered by trick lists. "There are a lot of really really good snowboarders out there, but you need to have a unique style and good personality to really make it," he said. Then, with the bluntness of somebody who has spent a lot of time in shared vans: "If there is a kid that is really good and can do all the double corks but is a dick - there is no way I would ever want to hang out with him or have him promote Nitro."

The roster he assembled and inherited reads like a decade of snowboarding: Eero Ettala, Bryan Fox, Austin Smith, Jon Kooley, Gjermund Braaten, Torgeir Bergrem, Sam Taxwood, Griffin Siebert, Benny Urban, Dominik Wagner, Marcus Kleveland. He described them, without visible irony, as "all amazing humans." He also, in an interview, floated the idea of snowboarding adopting baseball-style player trades, invented several fictional swaps involving Rome, Burton and a six-figure sum, then immediately said he hoped the sport never went that way. A marketer who talks himself out of his own best headline is a rare specimen.

The Head Bonk Heard Round The Edit Suite

Every career has a defining moment, and Eliassen's involves the removal of a beanie at speed. During the making of Nitro's team film Hyped!, he suggested to Eero Ettala that it would be funny if Ettala bonked him on the head off a jump. He expected a laugh. He received a proposal: Ettala reckoned he could 360 bonk the head in question. Eliassen, having no acceptable exit, said yes.

"Literally one minute later he was bonking my head," he recalled. "The fact that he was able to pull my beanie off while bonking was crazy. We were laughing the whole time, I mean it's a ridiculously silly thing to do. I didn't really think about the consequences too much until afterwards." The shot became the closing frame of the movie. It remains the only known example of a team manager being used as terrain.

He has also confessed, in the sly manner of a man enjoying his own confession, to occasionally borrowing an injured rider's clothing, pulling on a face mask, and landing the trick himself so the shot could be completed. He has never named names. "It's always a funny situation and creates good laughs within the crew," he said, which is roughly how one imagines Oscar Wilde would have described committing a small and elegant fraud.

Films, Tutorials And The Argument For Beginners

The film work stacked up: Hyped!, The Bad Seeds in 2015, Boom: The Nitro Movie in 2016, and in December 2017 28 Winters: A Nitro Snowboard Story, the brand's first full-length documentary, made with Pablo Films and Red Bull Media House, in which Eliassen appears in his then-capacity as team manager. It was an unusual move for a snowboard company: rather than another highlight reel, a film about its own heritage and the personalities inside it.

Alongside the glossy output sits something less glamorous and arguably more revealing. Nitro produces a ten-episode series called Learn To Snowboard, walking absolute beginners from their first time standing on a board through to adjusting their own gear. The host is not an intern. It is the Chief Marketing Officer. Most brands hand the entry-level content to whoever is free on Thursday. Eliassen appears to regard the first turn as the most important asset the company owns.

Which tracks with the thing he says most often. "The most important thing about my job is the ability to inspire people to snowboard. My goal is to get as many new people to start snowboarding as possible - because it's one of the few sports out there that makes you forget about everything going on in your life and allows you to just live in the moment."

The Slow Promotion

The titles accumulated in the unhurried way of somebody who was not, apparently, in a hurry. Representative and professional rider from 2005. Team manager. North American marketing and sports marketing manager. Global marketing and sports marketing manager. Vice President of Global Marketing, overseeing brand, media, social, video and team departments for both Nitro Snowboards and its outerwear sibling L1. Marketing Director from 2023. Chief Marketing Officer from March 2025.

Twenty years. One company. In an industry where the standard career move is a lateral hop to a rival with a better travel budget, staying put for two decades is either a failure of ambition or a very long game. The evidence suggests the latter. There is nobody else in the building who has been a Nitro rider, a Nitro rep, a Nitro team manager and a Nitro executive, which means there is nobody else who can say with authority what the brand looks like from all four seats.

He gave his own career advice once, and it was characteristically unhelpful to the ambitious: "I would say start snowboarding and then just be yourself. Always treat others fairly and people will respect you for that. Someday your snowboarding skills might become subpar and then you can think about becoming a TM. But if you are still young and love snowboarding, don't stop to become a TM - pursue your dream of becoming a pro snowboarder!" It is a rare executive who actively discourages applications.

In 2013, when the snowboard market was contracting, snow was late and good companies were folding, he was asked whether the sport was heading back to the stone age. He listed twenty young riders he believed in - Sam Taxwood, Forest Bailey, Benny Urban, Dominik Wagner, Blaze and Sage Kotsenburg, Torgeir Bergrem among them - and concluded: "It's tough out there, but snowboarding will come out stronger than ever." Optimism is cheap. Optimism with names attached is a forecast. Most of those names went on to matter.

His favourite piece of advice came from a school classmate in Norway named Torstein Horgmo, who told him to go out and scare himself. Eliassen thought it was a pretty bad ass attitude. He has, by the look of it, been quietly applying it to a marketing career ever since - which is one way to end up as the CMO, and a considerably more entertaining one than the alternative.