Rick Weissenborn has spent over three decades building Tools4Boards, a Calgary-based company that develops, manufactures, and sells ski and snowboard maintenance tools. The company sold its products through distributors and operated as an Amazon vendor for years before strategically transitioning to a direct-to-consumer model as an independent seller in 2025, fundamentally transforming how Tools4Boards reaches customers.
In the six months since becoming an independent seller in the Amazon store, Tools4Boards has seen sales grow 9x, with Amazon now representing 40 percent of the company’s overall revenue. Weissenborn predicts his company’s Amazon business will double in 2026 as they start to expand globally.
“Our products were always sold through distributors, but Amazon has offered a direct-to-consumer sales channel that hadn’t existed in our business,” explained Weissenborn, a former competitive alpine skier. “This has allowed us to expand globally, test new products, and have more insight into our customer base.”
Today, Tools4Boards lists over 350 products in the Amazon store, including hand tools, vises, brushes, ski files, stones, portable tables, and repair stands for skiers and snowboarders who want to fix and adjust their equipment. They sell their products in the Amazon store in the US and Canada, as well as through their website, and in 24 MEC stores in Canada.
Since becoming an independent seller, Weissenborn has tapped into several of Amazon’s seller tools, including Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), which provides storage, picking, packing, fulfillment, and customer service for orders. Tools4Boards is at the beginning of a multi-year expansion program into the UK and Europe through Amazon FBA and Pan-European Fulfillment by Amazon, which enables sellers to sell and fulfill products across multiple European countries through Amazon’s logistics network.
“As we sell niche products, it’s necessary for us to access a number of markets globally to make our business work from a volume perspective,” Weissenborn explained. “Selling on Amazon has helped us solve this challenge.”
Weissenborn added that the business has been able to keep up with its growing list of product listings in the Amazon store through the Enhance My Listings tool, which provides AI-powered recommendations to improve product descriptions. “Enhance My Listings has been a huge time saver for us and takes a lot of grunt work out of having to speculate what people will gravitate to,” Weissenborn noted.
Despite his company’s rapid growth, Weissenborn has kept it lean with just three employees, including his wife, Linda LeBourveau, who serves as chief marketing officer and sales and marketing manager. They work from their 3,000-square-foot warehouse in Calgary where they receive the components for their products, which are primarily manufactured in Canada and the US. They also source specialized components globally, such as high-end brushes from Germany and ski files from Switzerland.
“A lot of the products are niche so we focus on the best products that we can possibly source globally,” he said.
As an inventor, innovation has always been a priority for Weissenborn. He started inventing products during his first year of college when he developed a vice for holding alpine skis. He patented the invention and flew to Japan to sell it, securing a purchase order from a large distributor. His next innovation, the first compact cross-country vice that could fit into a pocket, became a best-seller. Since then, Weissenborn’s designs have won several awards, including two prestigious Red Dot Design awards.
His focus on innovation has continued through industry partnerships and now direct access to customers. As an official competition supplier to Alpine Canada, the national governing body for alpine, para-alpine and ski cross racing in Canada, Tools4Boards collaborates with its athletes to test new and innovative technologies prior to commercialization. In addition, Weissenborn says that selling in the Amazon store has unlocked new opportunities for innovation with customers.
“We can put ideas in front of opinion leaders and early adopters and from there it goes through a product cycle,” Weissenborn said. “There are some products I didn’t expect to do well but once we listed them in the Amazon store, they did well. As an inventor, this is really important.”
He’s now working on his 30th patent. His latest invention, Hex, is designed to simultaneously sharpen ski and snowboard sides and base edges, creating the sharp edges that skiers and snowboarders require.
While remaining focused on snow sport-related products, Weissenborn has started diversifying into bicycles, continuing his legacy of innovation that began more than three decades ago.