10/08/2025
You all know the incredible ladders and diving boards that come as standards and options on a Barletta. But do you know the story behind Lillipad Marine? The pictures below were taken on the very day Lillipad started.
It started over a holiday weekend in Michigan. Corey and Anne, the founders, were visiting family with their six-month-old daughter, Lilli, and a pack of kids with endless energy. Anne asked Corey if he could throw together a diving board to keep them entertained. He wasn’t exactly eager to tinker on vacation, but twenty minutes later he came back with the first “prototype”—a makeshift board built from scrap wood, a basketball for the spring, and duct tape holding it all together.
On the drive home, Corey and Anne realized something bigger: there wasn’t a single diving board designed for boats. They sketched ideas on a napkin, talking through what worked and what didn’t. Within a year and a half, they had turned that rough idea into a true product. The very first LilliPad Diving Board not only made it to market, it went on to win Best New Product at a distributor show and an Innovation Award at the Miami Boat Show.
That momentum never slowed. LilliPad Marine built ladders that solved the frustrations every boater knew too well, and they created the Ghost Mount system so boaters could add and remove accessories without changing the look of their boat—something Barletta was the first to bring onboard. The awards kept stacking up, but more importantly, they built a reputation for making life on the water easier, safer, and a lot more fun.
Lilli is 13 now, which means LilliPad Marine is too. The company is still a family run crew of just six full-time employees. They’re fellow boaters, Barletta owners themselves, and most of all, they’re family. That’s why it feels right to say they’re not just a supplier—they’re part of the Barletta story.