The couple behind major Aussie surfboard brand Haydenshapes on the year that changed everything
With a new home, and a revamped business model for Hayden and Danielle Cox, the future is looking golden after a devastating period.
Hayden and Danielle Cox spend a lot of time thinking about materials. Not only new ways with carbon fibre, fibreglass and resin for their surfboards – Haydenshapes, the business Hayden started as a surf-obsessed 15-year-old, is now globally recognised for its technology and design – but also in their new home in Sydney’s Palm Beach.
This includes the kinds of materials that can withstand the everyday low-level destruction of life with three children, Alaia, seven, Astyn, five and Aries, aged two.
“You can have a beautiful home with young kids, but material matters,” says Danielle of their design choices. Building – and furnishing – the home has another of the couple’s creative projects for the past four and a half years.
“So our Marc Newson Orgone chair [crafted in molded polypropylene], Hayden and I see it as a beautiful, sculptural collectible and our two-year-old sees it as a Tech Deck skate ramp. Or the glass table is going to be covered in dried-up Weet-Bix, which you could basically build a house with; it turns into mortar,” she adds.
“It’s a beautiful-looking table and chair and all these things, but they’re actually quite hard wearing. And then there’s other times where you’re just trying to educate them, ‘OK, let’s be careful with certain things’, and they’re pretty good. But for the most part the house is full of Lego and Monster trucks like any other house with kids.”
The connection to materials is essential for making a good surfboard, says Danielle.
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“There’s only so much marketing any brand can have. You can’t fake a bad surfboard because it’s just the surfer and the board.”
It’s this connection the couple believes has given the Haydenshapes brand the trust required to extend beyond surfboards into new categories including resin furniture, an apparel line and collaborations with other creatives such as artist Daniel Arsham and fashion designer Dion Lee. Hayden has also had partnerships with the likes of Audi and IWC Schaffhausen watches.
Continually chasing big ideas, he says, is part of it. That said, the collaboration with Daniel Arsham on a surfboard that featured eroded hollows in an echo of Arsham’s work with a clear polished fibreglass shell, was one on which the designer very nearly gave up.
“I mean we don’t set any rules or anything when choosing collaborators. I think we definitely love to learn something from them, [to] be challenged. And our best collaborations, say with Daniel Arsham, we share that common interest of, I guess, pushing boundaries and seeing where we could take something to and evolving it through that collaborative process,” Hayden says.
“And the Daniel Arsham, the board that we released, geez, that took me well over two years to figure out how to build it. And it was almost at a point where we were like, ‘Shit, I can’t actually figure out how to build this thing’. But I did say, ‘Hey Daniel, one more go. I’m going to try another thing. It’s random. Let me have another go’. And he’s on board that journey. And I think that’s when the collaborators come together and [we’re] both really invested in that big idea.”
Resilience, by the way, is something that Danielle admires in her husband. “I’ve never met anyone more resilient than Hayden … sometimes I’m a little bit more emotional in some ways … That saying, the ‘Let them’ mentality, I feel like Hayden really has kind of had that mantra, of ‘Let them, [this is] where I am going to put my energy.’”
Both speak of their relationship as almost yin and yang. Hayden says it is Danielle’s kindness and willingness to help people that he particularly appreciates. “I think Danielle is a very kind person who gives a lot of herself to other people, including myself and the kids, and that’s for me something really special,” he says.
Still, creating a harmonious new home was essential for many reasons. One, because as Danielle says the couple tends to “thrive in chaos” and needed a retreat that offered a moment of pause. And two because they spend so much time together. In fact, they still share a desk.
Danielle joined the business in 2011, never really expecting that it would become her full-time gig, or that it would be where she has done her best work.
“I’m lucky Danielle was quite naive to what it meant,” says Hayden. “I did somewhat explain it to her that you will not be able to have a part-time job or gig outside of doing the role. It’s all-encompassing because it consumes you and you just get soaked up and you have to put everything into it to make it work. The cool thing [is], the business and the brand reflects both of our input. It’s our kind of reflection of both the people that we are.”
Incorporating family life into the business, as well as almost everything the couple does, is important to them. This included the design of the house. The children had a say and the couple think they appreciate it all the more as a result.
“The kids were really involved throughout the entire process. I’m sitting in our loungeroom now and I distinctly remember all of us with chalk mapping out where the sofa would go. So [they have a] really good understanding of what it takes to build a house, to build a surfboard. They’re certainly not kids that expect to just get what they ask for. They’re like, ‘OK, well, if I want a surfboard, I’m going to ask Dad if I can build one with him in the factory’,” Danielle says. “I do feel like there was a real sense of appreciation of, ‘This is my new room and I’m going to take care of it’, and ‘Well, I’m not going to be too silly with this because I know that these things take a long time to make’.”
For this reason, it makes sense for the couple that the kids know what they do, and why they do it. “I think you can either go two ways, you can sort of keep your kids separate from what you do … But I feel like Hayden and I, because we are a family-run business and we do all these weird, wild and wonderful projects, we sort of involve the kids where we can so they have an understanding of what’s going on,” she says.
Which is not to say that everything always goes to plan. In October last year the couple experienced a major, and devastating, setback when a fire ripped through their Mona Vale surfboard factory, destroying some 40 per cent of its production line overnight. Thankfully nobody was seriously hurt. It came in a period when Hayden’s dad had just suffered a stroke and they were also faced with the prospect of their eldest daughter, Alaia, requiring major surgery on both legs for a rare genetic condition called nail-patella syndrome. (This journey is one that’s still ongoing for the family.)
It was, to be sure, an annus horribilis.
“There was a 12-month period, quite frankly, that was probably the hardest time of our lives,” says Danielle. “There was a chain of events that probably took far more of an emotional toll over that period than we’d previously ever experienced.”
Ultimately though, the experience gave them renewed appreciation of what matters. “It put a lot of things into perspective. It’s like, ‘What things are replaceable in life? What things are not replaceable?’. And we haven’t sweated much since,” says Danielle.
In a business sense it forced them to rethink their approach, too. In the past two years they’ve taken back their distribution and now have full control over sales, production and logistics, a massive undertaking that they say positions the brand for acceleration. There are new projects on the horizon and they’ve also seen huge growth in newer categories such as Haydenshapes softboards for kids that they want to nurture. “It’s really exciting to see little kids on our softboards, which was never really a focus for us 10 years ago because we probably didn’t have that mindset,” says Danielle of her business perspective pre children.
Hayden’s favourite thing, still, is hearing about people having the ride of their life on one of his boards. “Just seeing customers super stoked, going on a trip, coming back and just going, ‘Oh my god, I had my best surf’, or ‘I caught that wave’. And seeing young kids; it’s really a great feeling to see kids experience surfing and get better and they’re riding one of your boards.”
Taking control where you can – and anyone who lives in this world can tell you that taking control otherwise is an almost impossible thing – is another lesson from that awful year. “It does feel like a whole new chapter that you’re in full control,” says Hayden of the new logistics systems for the business.
It’s also another evolution in what he says has been a continuous learning path since he first started shaping boards as a teenager growing up on Sydney’s North Shore.
“I’ve always learned through Haydenshapes. Even when I was at school, I did my school assignments on Haydenshapes. I’ve always used that as a vehicle … to evolve and learn about different things,” he says.
Still, amid this evolution, the family is taking time to enjoy their new home. Palm Beach has long been special to the couple, well before they moved there and had children. Part of it is the community. You hardly ever need to text anybody to go to the beach because you’re bound to meet someone there, says Hayden, and the kids love a lot of the things their parents also enjoy, such as watching a sunset or walking to the beachside suburb’s Bible Garden.
A place where they can all just be feels more important to the couple than ever.
As Hayden puts it, amid the busyness and the big ideas, there’s appreciation for life’s quieter moments, too. “We did design the home really thinking about that family lifestyle and feeling quite grounded and calm and thinking about who would enjoy what parts of the house and having those little design decisions cater to both Danielle and I, and also the kids,” he says.
“Luckily we live in a beautiful part of Sydney, and you can get a lot of enjoyment just from doing the simple things that are right in front of you,” he says.
This story is from the March issue of WISH.
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