The History

Tower was founded in 2010 with the purpose of making the So Cal beach lifestyle, we know and love, more accessible. Our first innovation was in the distribution channel where we started selling stand up paddle boards direct to consumer at half the price of retail. Our off-the-charts value proposition was an instant hit with consumers. Then we pioneered 6” thick inflatable paddle boards. They went from less than 1% of the SUP market to well over 70% today, and in doing so Tower became one of the fastest growing private companies in America. 

We quickly extended our direct to consumer value proposition (coupled with premium products and the best customer service in the industry) into a number of other surf lifestyle product categories. On of our latest and hottest new introductions is high-end electric beach cruisers that we sell through Tower Electric Bikes. 

In 2019, opened the waterfront Tower Beach Club event venue in the heart of San Diego’s Pacific Beach community. Today we’ve partnered with our beach club neighbor, Mission Bay Sport Center, to innovate one of the world’s fastest growing watersports, wakesurfing, by making it more accessible, more convenient, and more affordable with the Tower WakeSurf Club, operated exclusively by Mission Bay Sport Center.  

When Mark Cuban invested $150,000 for a 30% stake in Tower Paddle Boards on Shark Tank, we had only $100,000 in lifetime sales. Since then we’ve done well over $40 Million in sales. His return on investment is almost 20x. We’ve been named the #1 fastest growing company in San Diego, and #239 on the INC 500 list of America’s fastest growing companies. Today we’re the most searched brand in paddle boards worldwide, and we’re on course for a similar path in electric bikes. 

Tower WakeSurf, operated exclusively by Mission Bay Sport Center, is just another chapter in our quest to make the beach lifestyle more accessible. Again, we're innovating in one of the fastest growing water sports in the world, this time with fractional ownership of extraordinarily expensive luxury wakesurf boats. We're starting in front of the Tower Beach Club, our beachfront corporate headquarters. 

In 2015, Tower quietly launched a novel 5-hour workday experiment for our team, and in doing so challenged what had not changed since the Industrial Revolution, the 8 hour workday. Word of our experiment spread and caught wildfire, so we were compelled to write a book called “The Five Hour Workday” detailing our experiment. That book got major press across the US media landscapes as well as in over 20 countries around the world, spreading awareness of our contrarian concept to over 10 million people worldwide. 

Our contrarian experiment has inspired 100s of companies to experiment with their workday in similar fashion, and the concept has been chronicled in the world’s leading newspapers including the NYT, WSJ, and FT. A copy of our book is sent with every paddle board order still today, to inspire our customers to live a more extraordinary life.