Shaun White's Business is Red Hot

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Photograph by Martin Schoeller

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Photograph by Martin Schoeller

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Inside the White House

When he won the gold medal in snowboarding at the 2006 Olympics in Torino, everyone knew how Shaun White's story would end. The corporate advertising complex would line up to capitalize, just as it has with every gold medalist since decathlete Bruce Jenner. And White, with his strange equine beauty and crazy pile of long red hair, would assume the position, allowing his action-sports cred and new America's-darling status to be sucked out of him and slapped on every can, box, and cookie bag in the nation. All the elements for cashing in and selling out were in place: Take a kid with working-class roots (his mom was a waitress, his dad worked for the water utility in San Clemente, California); add Olympic gold and huge endorsement checks; run the cliché. Heinz would offer six figures to put White on everything from ketchup bottles to stewed tomatoes (White's then-nickname: the Flying Tomato). Maybe a toothpaste company would come pushing tubes of new Shaun Extreme Whitening. Throw in some potential heavy-rotation spots for Schick Xtreme Shaving and Doritos Extreme Nacho Cheesiness and the caricature is close to complete. As a final inspired bit of packaging, someone would lay down the big bucks to insert Mr. White in a straight-to-DVD production of Faster Times After Ridgemont High, where he would be cast as a snowboarding Spicoli attending a junior college somewhere near Banff. White would then spontaneously combust into the most awesome! bitchin'! rad! gnarly! D-list spokes-celeb ever.

But Shaun White took a pass on becoming the Crown Fool of Gnarnia. "I was so fortunate to have had some success before the Olympics," he says. "So when the time came for everyone to come at me, I was able to step back and say, 'Do I really want to do that? Do I want to be known for airing over some dude who is going aaaahhh! with his teeth gleaming?' "

Considering the risks involved in his day jobs -- in 2003 he added pro skateboarder to his résumé and took gold at the 2007 Summer X Games -- control is a survival instinct. (At 11, a midair collision with another skateboarder left him with a cracked skull, a broken arm, and a fractured foot.) Even as a teenager, White understood the power of his image -- his pre-Olympic sponsor list included Mountain Dew and T-Mobile -- and felt compelled to protect it. "A photo would go out that I didn't approve, and a kid would come up and have me sign it," says White, now 22. "And it's an awful photo, and I know because I'm signing it he's going to put it up on his wall. Now he's got this awful photo on his wall. That stuff would get to me." So much so that at 15, he made sure his agent wrote a right of approval into all his contracts to control the use of his name or likeness. "A lot of people will just put their name on anything, and you can tell," he says. "I just can't do that."

Unlike gymnast Shawn Johnson with McDonald's, or human fish Michael Phelps with Subway, White has sought out companies he truly connects with. Working with a tight team of advisers that include his 29-year-old brother, Jesse, and his agent, Mark Ervin of IMG, White sees these deals as a long-term investment portfolio, something that will outlast his knees. Each corporation meshes with a discrete slice of his actual life, and with each one, White dives in and takes a central role, from the design of specific products to pulling deals together among his various partners. Last fall, his street-wear line appeared in Target stores across the country. This year, he expanded his best-selling Burton collection of snowboarding gear to include a stand-alone extension for women. There are marketing deals with HP, Oakley, and Red Bull. He collaborated on a snowboarding video game with Ubisoft that went on sale just before the holidays. And whether it's the quirky commercials for Target, the reality-style video shorts in the back-to-school Web campaign for HP, or the high-energy ads for Ubisoft, the ecstatic look and feel of the White DNA comes through. "Every week, we get presented with a big opportunity from someone," says Ervin. "Shaun turns down a lot of money. And I couldn't be more proud of him."

The companies that do make the cut look to White as a tractor beam to the $150 billion youth market. "Shaun White has this ability to juggle his authentic world and the corporate world and be that third platform between the two," says DeeDee Gordon, a trend expert whose L.A.-based company, Look-Look, focuses on youth culture. "He is living by his own code, and young people admire that. He has definitely stayed true."