Thanks to the support of our local Portland customers, PTO Ski & Snowboard is ready to take its first step beyond our home market.
Beginning with the 2026/27 snow season, we are partnering with Mingjing Snowboard, an instructor-owned snowboard shop serving the Seattle and Bellevue area. Mingjing will be the first independent local shop to receive PTO's technology, marketing, and retail support.
This partnership is not about replacing a local shop or changing what makes Mingjing special. Its ownership remains unchanged, and Mingjing will continue to be a locally owned, instructor-owned snowboard shop focused on serving its own community.
At PTO, we believe local snow shops should keep their own identity, personality, and connection with local riders. Our goal is not to turn every shop into the same store. Our goal is to provide better tools, stronger technology, broader marketing support, and additional retail resources so a good local shop can do what it already does—only better.
We hope to bring the same service philosophy that has guided PTO from the beginning: real experience, honest advice, personal service, and a commitment to helping customers find the right equipment, not simply the most expensive one.
Local ownership. Local identity. Better support.
We are excited to support Mingjing's next chapter and to bring the PTO approach to more riders in Seattle and Bellevue.
An Open Invitation to Independent Shops
Mingjing is the first, but we hope it won't be the last.
If you run an independent snow shop — anywhere, in any state — and you either don't sell online yet, or you've never quite figured out how to do it well, we'd like to talk.
Let's be honest about why. A small independent shop doesn't buy at the price a national chain does. We don't have their sales channels, and we can't match their advertising budgets. And shipping eats whatever's left — send a snowboard from Portland to a customer in New York, and we're barely breaking even, sometimes losing money on the freight alone. None of that changes as long as each of us keeps fighting it alone. Together, it does.
That's the whole idea behind the alliance. Here's the part PTO can carry for you:
- Our best shipping discounts, passed straight through to you
- The online store and technology we've already built
- Shared marketing, so the cost of reaching riders is spread across all of us
- And ptoski.com as a shared platform — an alliance of independent shops, not one chain
The orders work the way they should. We're all authorized dealers working from the same manufacturer pricing, so joining the alliance never means undercutting — or being undercut by — the shop down the road. When an order comes in through ptoski.com, it's routed to whichever shop is closest to the customer's shipping address. That New York rider gets served by a shop near New York — nobody's shipping a board across the country at a loss anymore.
You keep your shop, your name, and your community. We handle the parts of online retail that are hard to build alone.
You don't have to fold into a chain to compete online. You just need the right tools behind you.
If that sounds like something you'd want for your shop, reach out.
ski@ptoski.com
