Corey Cooper walks to the edge of the roof of his guest house and stares down at the pool below. His wife, Magda Cooper, lounges on an inflatable dock and faces the poolside photographer, who is waiting to see what Corey will do. Will he jump in the pool? Corey looks again and inches closer, his toes touching the edge.

“This is what the company is like,” he says.

In one quick move, Corey steps off the roof, into the air below. He jumps in.

Corey and Magda Cooper have always been jumping in. Jumping into their marriage and family. Jumping into solving impossible problems. Jumping into graduating early from Auburn University in 2005 and winning national championships in swimming.

For the past 13 years, they’ve spent every waking moment building Bote, a global water lifestyle brand that mixes the couple’s rebel spirit with a relentless pursuit of quality.

What started in a storage unit below a Mellow Mushroom in Destin, Florida, has become a company with more than 70 domestic employees, 350 products and $100 million in annual sales.

Corey Cooper jumps from the roof of his guest house into the pool where his wife, Magda, is floating. The Coopers have made quite a splash with their outdoor lifestyle brand, Bote. (Auburn Magazine)

The Jimmy Page of paddleboards

It is a hot day in Destin and the Coopers are walking around their warehouse facilities in an industrial park near the airport.

They walk through a 110,000-square-foot space packed with stand-up paddleboards (SUPs), kayaks, coolers, inflatable chairs and other items that make up the Bote product lines of “paddle,” “leisure,” “gear” and “power.” It is a hulking reminder of Bote’s reach across the outdoor and watersport market, which is estimated at $14 billion in North America alone.

They empty this huge warehouse almost every week, shipping more than 200 paddleboards daily to consumers and retailers like outdoor company REI. In all, their company keeps about $20 million of inventory in Destin, also filling up old Sears and J.C. Penney store spaces in a shuttered shopping mall across town.

Next door is the Darkroom, the innovative heart of Bote. Corey is quick to remind that they didn’t invent the paddleboard, they just improved it, using one of his favorite topics: music.

“You look at Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page,” Corey says. “That band didn’t invent the blues or rock; they just remixed it. That’s what we’re doing here.”

The Darkroom features a 4-Axis CNC Mill that allows a new board design to be quickly cut from a foam blank. Those blanks are taken to shaping rooms where the boards are laminated and finished. Bote can go from design idea to rideable prototype in about a week. This allows the company to average six new product releases a year.

One area of product innovation for Bote was building a better inflatable paddleboard. Unlike their fiberglass counterparts, inflatable SUPs can be deflated and carried in a car trunk or a backpack, opening up paddleboarding to landlocked customers. In fact, 60% of Bote buyers are inland, not near a beach or water.

The other was allowing their customers to outfit a kayak or board to fit their lifestyle. If you want to fish, you can buy the board and then all the accessories that help you land the big one. It’s that quality — plus customization — that has fueled Bote’s growth. The brand is further extended with a full suite of coolers, inflatable furniture, beer, hats and T-shirts, all reflecting the brand’s gritty, sun-filled aesthetic that feels like a cross between a surf shop and a tattoo parlor.

William Addison is a product designer and a 2011 Auburn industrial design graduate. Beyond the look, he says the key to Bote’s products is that the company makes everything “bomb proof.”

“We’re not trying to shave pennies off every product,” he says, holding up cups designed for a floating beer pong game. “It’s about quality. When you buy anything from Bote, you can feel how well it’s made.” According to the company’s internal documents, Bote’s brand quality perception outpaces several legacy outdoor companies.

Magda and Corey Cooper with some of the products that have made their company, Bote, one of the fastest-growing businesses in the watersports industry. (contributed)

Different strokes for different folks

Talking with the Coopers is an exercise in contrasts. Corey is all positive energy. Even in the most casual of conversations, he is pushing forward, exploring, testing out ideas by speaking them into existence. It’s a style that some employees said takes a while to get used to.

“I jump into things deep and fast,” Corey said. “I’m like a dolphin. I use talking as echolocation. I can’t passively observe. I haven’t ever gotten what I want that way.”

Magda has the quiet confidence of a former athlete and the poise of someone used to playing the long game. Someone who can swim six hours a day for an entire year to try to win a national championship in four days in March. She often pauses before speaking, looking for the right word.

“There’s a yin and yang with the two of us, for sure,” she says. Their 18-year relationship reveals itself in the easy way they finish each other’s sentences and the occasional furtive looks they give one another.

But they are united in their passion for their work, for their family, for their employees and for Auburn. Their love of the school is the reason they won’t relocate the company because it would be too far away from the Plains. And why they go back on the weekends to games and hire Auburn graduates whenever they can.

“Auburn has a soul,” Corey says. “It’s as simple as that.”

Corey grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, an inquisitive and energetic kid. His mom taught school and his father ran a small car dealership. They both started several unsuccessful small businesses and provided Corey with the basics, but nothing more.

By the time Corey was 5, he was tearing apart radios and toy tractors to see how they worked. At 6, wanting a guitar, he made a working one out of a cereal box. Already sure he was going to be an engineer, Corey made his own fishing rod at 8. He tinkered. He analyzed. He began to construct a life he wanted with his hands.

His parents divorced and he moved with his mom to Texas, then Alabama and then to Woodstock, Georgia, for high school, where he excelled in math (“it was like my second language”), physics and calculus. He graduated with a 4.2 GPA and picked Auburn engineering over Georgia Tech. He enrolled in fall 2001 with 31 college credits.

Magda Dyszkiewicz never sat still, even before she was born. In 1981, her parents fled communist Poland for Germany while her mom was pregnant with her. When Magda was 2, the family moved to Salisbury, North Carolina, where she became an “explorer.” Their house sat on 6 acres next to a hunting preserve. Magda spent her days climbing trees, lighting bonfires and “messing around in the woods.”

But the water soon called. Magda’s father was an accomplished swimmer in Poland and founded a club team in Salisbury. Along with her two older brothers, Magda began swimming when she was 4. At 15, she decided to get serious about it. And she was good.

In 1999, Auburn University came calling. Swimming coach Dave Marsh and women’s coach Kim Brackin recruited Magda. While the men’s team had recently won multiple national championships, the women’s team had not. That didn’t discourage Magda; it was what attracted her to the program.

“What sold me on Auburn was the idea of being able to go somewhere and help build something,” she says. Little did she know how much that would help her after she left Auburn.

But first she had to swim four hours every day under Brackin’s stern command, hoping all the work would pay off in the NCAA championships at the end of the year. The women’s team won its first national title in 2002, and then followed it up in 2003 and 2004. Magda earned All-American honors and graduated with a degree in business. On her graduation night, she met a mechanical engineering major and fellow graduate named Corey Cooper.

More than a decade ago, Corey Cooper applied his expertise in engineering and his high-energy personal style to the task of building a better paddleboard. The result is a company, Bote, with a global reputation and ever-growing sales. (contributed)

Building a better mousetrap

Like all things Bote, the origin story of the company is part sun-drenched day and part insane idea.

In 2009, Corey and Magda were hanging out at Crab Island, a shallow water inlet in Destin where people gather to swim, sunbathe and party. A guy came around with something new called a paddleboard. It was bulky and slow and hard to stay on. They watched 10 people try it and 10 fell off.

“It’s a bad mousetrap. It’s a poor design,” said Corey, who was already working as an industrial engineer for the military.

“It’s something that people were attracted to,” he recalls. “The simplicity, the elegance, the visual concept of being able to stand up to paddle, but nobody could do it.”

Right there, they had the vision. Of a better paddleboard. One that was cool-looking, easy to ride and, most importantly, a platform that the user could customize to go anywhere and do anything on the water, from yoga to fishing. The “unicorn,” Magda calls it, that they would chase for the next decade.

“I’m looking at this as a simple platform, basically like, ‘Dude, this could be your boat, your vessel to go places,’” Corey says. And so, they named it Bote. A play on words, sure, but also a guiding principle. Anything you can do on a boat you should be able to do on their paddleboards.

In 13 years, Bote has become a major manufacturer of watersports products. (contributed)

Bote started with paddleboards and now makes 350 different products. (Auburn Magazine)

Revenge of the beach bums

Sometimes, the place where a vision becomes a reality smells like oil and spaghetti sauce. For Bote, that place was a dingy storage unit below a Destin Mellow Mushroom. There, Corey worked every night until 2 or 3 in the morning, shaping the first Bote paddleboards, smoke and fiberglass billowing out into the parking lot. They tested them on the beach on weekends, one ride at a time.

In 2010, they sold the first 50 to friends and family, Corey making them all by hand. They maxed out their credit cards and borrowed money from family. “The whole idea is how do we turn one dollar into two dollars,” Magda says.

To increase production, Corey traveled to China and struck a deal with a manufacturer to make the shells. Even as they sold their first 1,000 paddleboards, it was just the two of them, making, shipping and selling the products. Corey was still working a daytime engineering job and Magda was hitting all the outdoor shows in the Southeast.

Friends and family told them they were crazy. Why would two people with degrees from Auburn want to build paddleboards? Want to be beach bums?

And for a brief moment they contemplated quitting. But that’s when Magda remembered those hours training in the pool, keeping her eye on a unicorn that was always on the horizon.

“We had to have complete tunnel vision,” Magda says. “We just knew we had no option but to go forward.”

And so they did what they always do: They jumped in.

Corey left his engineering job in 2012 to focus full time on Bote. In July 2012, they opened their first store in Destin and hired their first employee. They couldn’t keep the product on the shelves.

Their vision was starting to take shape. What the haters didn’t understand was that Corey and Magda weren’t building paddleboards. They were building a brand. And that brand was about to take off.

After working with her husband to build Bote into a global brand, Magda Cooper stepped away from the day-to-day operations last year to spend more time with the couple’s three children. Corey Cooper is preparing to hire a president for the company to give him a more flexible schedule as well. (contributed)

The family business

What happens when you build a company, a family and a life at the same time? For the Coopers, it means the line between Bote and their family, between their professional and personal lives, doesn’t exist.

“Not at all,” Corey says. “We call Bote our second baby because it was ‘born’ right after our first child, Tristan.”

Look at a Bote catalog and the photogenic family are the models for many of the products. Magda calls their modern home in Destin (which they knocked down to the studs and rebuilt themselves), their product testing lab. It’s full of discarded demos, forgotten ideas and paddleboard prototypes.

“We don’t sell a product that our family hasn’t used, is using or will use in the future,” Magda says.

Carol Zorn, a 2007 Auburn graduate, is a Bote graphic designer and loves working for a company that encourages her to be herself and occasionally allows employees to wear a swimsuit to work. “You can really see Corey and Magda in the look and feel of the brand and the culture here,” Zorn says. “They understand what it’s like to be a parent.”

After more than a decade of charging ahead, there are signs the couple are starting to step back, at least a little. Now with three children, Magda stepped away from the day-to-day operations last year to spend more time with them.

“I’d rather have regrets about the company than our children,” she says. The company has hired an executive team and plans to bring on a president, giving Corey the flexibility to step away from the daily operations.

Magda says she misses the days when she knew every employee by name and their families. Growth is what they want for Bote, but both acknowledge it feels a bit different than it did a few years ago.

Not that Bote is going anywhere but up. The company is doubling its retail stores and planning an aggressive expansion into Europe and Australia. But the Coopers realize that the company is bigger than them and there is a life after Bote.

Magda drops a paddleboard into the shallows from the dock behind their house and steps down on it. She is perfectly balanced as she starts paddling. “Not my first time doing that,” she says, laughing.

“We failed so much, but we failed fast,” says Corey, thinking about the early days. He says he could launch Bote again in 24 months, knowing what they know now.

“I don’t think I would change anything. You can’t do it any differently,” Magda says.

She catches up to Corey, who has jumped in ahead of her, and they playfully splash each other. For a moment there are no deadlines. No employees to hire or products to test. Just the two of them gliding toward an orange and blue horizon, the sun melting into the bay.

This story originally appeared in the Auburn Alumni Association’s Auburn Magazine.