Cooking up a legacy
David Strydom
Why does a British flooring manufacturer still feel like family after 60 years?
Ask the third generation…
THERE’s a place in Portugal that Danni Cooke has been visiting since she was a baby. Her grandfather went there first, then her father, then Danni herself, for 30 years and counting. Now she takes her own children.
‘It’s a family place,’ she says. ‘We hold a lot of memories there.’
It reflects the Cooke family itself: something started by one generation, carried on by the next and now passed down again. While the holiday destination has stayed the same, the business has followed a similar path, built by her grandfather, grown by her father and uncle, and now, in its 60th year, shaped by Danni as business director at COBA and CAT and her brother Josh, operations director at CAT.
Danni never met her grandfather in any real professional sense. He passed away when she was 11. But his influence, she says, never really left.
‘His passion carried on through the whole family.’ It ran through her father, Mark, and her uncle, Richard, who took Danni under his wing when she first came into the business. He had a phrase she’s never forgotten: ‘Go and rip up some trees.’
It was her uncle who gave her the fire in her belly for sales, while her father gave her commercial instinct. Her grandfather gave the family purpose and a name worth carrying forward.
‘I’d love to go back 60 years and live through him,’ she says. ‘To see how he set this business up. That would be pretty cool.’ It is, you suspect, something she’d reflect on over a glass of Prosecco or rosé, her drinks of choice, knowing the business he built is in safe hands.
Danni’s work ethic started early. At 16, she stacked shelves at a garden centre before moving to tills. Her first full-time role was in telesales at COBA.
COBA’s name is part family history: Co from Cooke, Ba from Bateman, the two founders. What began as an industrial matting business has grown into a wider flooring group, expanded five years ago with the acquisition of Carpet Accessory Trims (CAT).
Growing up in a family business, you might expect the industry to have been all Danni ever knew. The reality, she says, was quite different.
‘People assume that because you’re born into it, it must have been all you talked about, but honestly I never felt pressure to come into the business at all. I went to university thinking I wanted to work with children in hospitals, specialising in nutrition.’
When she graduated, the desire to travel, and the need to fund it, brought her through the door. She joined the matting side of COBA, working in telesales and customer service. What happened next, she says, surprised even her. ‘I got a bit of a bug for it. It sparked a desire to want to know more.’
That curiosity led her to Cape Town for six months, an experience she describes as a real learning curve. ‘I didn’t have a lot of knowledge at that point,’ she recalls. Her time there included internal sales, customer visits alongside account managers and, notably, work with Toyota on automotive products and quality processes.
‘It was predominantly sales,’ she says, ‘but it gave me a real understanding of the whole business.’
The past five years, Danni says, have been the most formative of her career, largely because she’s been working alongside her father.
‘My role expanded and I’ve probably learned the most from my dad in that time,’ she reflects. It’s the kind of knowledge that only comes from working closely together: commercial instinct and a deeper understanding of what the business really is beneath the day-to-day.
More recently, her brother joined the company and things shifted again. Four years in, they’ve found their rhythm. ‘We both have a clear sense of who does what,’ she says with a laugh. ‘I’m more sales and marketing, he’s more operational, and he probably gets bossed about by his bigger sister.’
But beneath the humour, Danni is serious about what comes next. Her hopes for the future are rooted not in product lines or market share, but in people. ‘There’s no business without our team,’ she says. The business runs on four values: care, optimism, belief and adaptability. Her ambition is to see those values carried through every layer of the company.
‘I hope the brand remains as strong as it is today,’ she adds. ‘And I really believe it’s only going to get stronger.’
That confidence feels well-placed in a milestone year. COBA turns 60 in 2026, and CAT, acquired five years ago, marks its 40th. Together, that adds up to a century of manufacturing between two British, family-built businesses. Danni doesn’t take that lightly.
‘There aren’t many manufacturers who can say that,’ she says. ‘It makes me really proud, proud of what the family built and proud of what the team has made it today.’
The celebrations have already begun. A company bowling night brought the whole team together, and the marketing team is running a timeline across social media, charting where the business has been and where it’s heading. Nonetheless, COBA has never been a company that needed to shout.
In many ways, its legacy speaks for itself.
