WHITESPACE: How Shaun White's Snowboard Brand Builds a Team, and the Jobs That Come With It

When an Olympic snowboarding legend starts a snowboard company, the fun part is the graphics on the deck, but the real story is the org chart. WHITESPACE, the performance snow and lifestyle brand founded by Shaun White, is a perfect case study in what happens when a world-class athlete stops competing and starts building a real business, with real jobs, real supply chains, and a real team. This is the part of the action sports industry Malakye has obsessed over since 2002: not just who wins the contest, but who gets hired to make the whole machine run.

White soft launched WHITESPACE on Thursday, January 13, 2022, unveiling an active lifestyle brand alongside a signature Pro model snowboard, according to Forbes. The timing was pointed. He was heading into his final Olympic Games in Beijing, and by his own framing this was the next chapter. As he told Glossy, launching his own brand was "what I need right now." Hypebeast later noted that the three-time Olympic Gold Medalist rode his last Olympics in 2022, but "his retirement did not signal a complete departure from the sport."

A Name That Doubles as a Job Description

The brand name is a pun on his own, but White gave it a second meaning that reads like a mission statement for a startup. "Whitespace is obviously a play on my name, but also it means opportunity, a gap in the market, a blank canvas waiting for something new and creative," he told Forbes. That "blank canvas" idea is not just marketing. It is how small brands actually hire. As White put it in his 2024 Hypebeast interview, "we are still figuring this out. Things are changing daily and we are learning and growing as we go."

That single sentence tells a job seeker everything. Early-stage brands do not hire narrow specialists to sit in a lane. They hire people who can wear five hats, ship product, and figure out the process while doing it. WHITESPACE is exactly that kind of shop, and you can see it on its Malakye company page, which is where it turned when it came to hiring.

The Jobs a New Brand Actually Creates

Here is the inside-the-machine part that gets glossed over in the highlight reels. When White launched, WHITESPACE did not build a giant retail footprint. It went to market through a single exclusive partner, the outdoor retailer Backcountry. "For me, Backcountry felt like the obvious first choice for this partnership," White said in the brand's expansion announcement. "Besides being a personal fan of Backcountry, they have over 25 years of experience in the outdoor retail business, and it all started with skiing and riding," per the official release.

Leaning on a retail partner for distribution is a deliberate team-building choice. It means the brand does not need to staff up an entire wholesale sales force and logistics department on day one. Instead, the early hires cluster around product, design, and brand. White has been open that this is a family operation at its core. His older brother Jesse steered "everything you've seen visually within the brand," according to Forbes. NBC 7 San Diego reported the launch of the active lifestyle brand the same way, as a founder-led project with a tight creative circle.

Then the hiring math changes when the product line grows. In October 2022, WHITESPACE expanded with new snowboards and apparel, with White telling Forbes flatly, "I want to keep pushing." Every one of those product categories is a hiring signal. Outerwear needs technical apparel designers and materials people. Hardgoods need snowboard engineers and product managers. A growing catalog needs merchandising, ecommerce, customer service, and marketing. This is the exact category mix, product design, softgoods, hardgoods, brand, and ecommerce, that fills the Malakye jobs board across the action sports and outdoor industry.

By 2024, WHITESPACE was clearly playing a bigger game than a single signature board. As Boardroom detailed in its look at White's second act, the brand pushed into higher-profile territory, including a co-branded collaboration with Moncler, while White simultaneously stood up The Snow League as a competition platform. Collaborations and events do not run themselves. They are partnership managers, event operators, and production staff. The brand keeps generating jobs faster than the average fan realizes.

The Amer Sports Contrast: Two Ways to Build a Team

To understand why WHITESPACE is such a clean case study, it helps to put it next to the opposite model on the same field. Amer Sports is the multi-brand conglomerate version of the outdoor industry. It is a global platform of sport and outdoor brands, including Arc'teryx, Salomon, Wilson, Atomic, and Peak Performance, and it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "AS" on February 1, 2024, in an offering that CNBC reported and that Amer itself marked as its first day on the NYSE.

To be clear, WHITESPACE and Amer Sports are separate companies, and this is not a story about one owning the other. The connection is structural, and it is the whole point for anyone job hunting in this space. These are the two poles of how a snow and outdoor career gets built. On one end you have the athlete-founded startup, small, fast, family-led, where a single hire touches product, brand, and operations all at once. On the other end you have the publicly traded portfolio company with deep specialist tracks, defined functions, and a brand under it for nearly every discipline you could want. Both hire the same kind of people who grew up riding, and both live on Malakye's companies directory.

Knowing which pole fits you is a real career skill. Do you want the blank canvas, or the built machine? A WHITESPACE-style shop rewards generalists who thrive in ambiguity and want their fingerprints on everything. An Amer Sports-style organization rewards people who want to go deep in one craft, whether that is Salomon ski boot engineering or Wilson product management, with the resources of a billion-dollar platform behind them.

Why This Matters for Your Job Search

The reason we keep hammering this at Malakye is simple. The action sports industry runs on people who care about the sport, and the best jobs almost never look like a generic corporate posting. A brand born from an athlete's own competitive story, built with his brother, launched through one trusted retail partner, and expanded category by category, is a living map of how these companies actually staff up. Read the launch that way and every product drop becomes a hiring forecast.

WHITESPACE proves that when a world-class athlete builds a real brand, the medals are the beginning, not the end. The endless follow-on work, the design, the sourcing, the merchandising, the ecommerce, the partnerships, the events, is where the jobs live. And whether your dream is the blank canvas of a founder-led brand or the deep bench of a global platform like Amer Sports, the move is the same. Study how the team is built, figure out where you fit, and go find the opening. That is what Malakye has been built to do, over two decades and counting.