Seven brothers, a propeller and a pump.

Jacuzzi is a family surname before it is a brand. The Chicago Tribune, in a July 1985 profile syndicated from the Orlando Sentinel, said that Jacuzzi Brothers was founded in 1915, when seven immigrant Jacuzzi brothers developed a pitched propeller for aircraft. English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times in August 2023 and several published company histories, places that start in Berkeley, California, and says the siblings came from Casarsa della Delizia in northern Italy; the 1985 profile calls the firm “Jacuzzi Brothers of Walnut Creek,” the town where it was later based.

The same 1985 profile traced the company’s turn from the air to the ground. After the propellers, the brothers made fans, furnaces and wind machines meant to keep frost off fruit orchards, and in 1926 the firm developed a water-injection jet pump, which the paper called the forerunner of the later Jacuzzi pump. Pumps became the family business. In the mid-1950s, the profile said, a family member designed a small pump that could be set in an ordinary household bathtub; it looked, in Roy Jacuzzi’s words, “very much like a sump pump you would put in your basement,” and took up most of one end of the tub. English Wikipedia credits that pump to Candido Jacuzzi, one of the founding brothers, and says it was marketed from 1955–56. Its early buyers, the Tribune reported, were mainly hospitals and athletic groups.

The product that turned the surname into a household word came from the third generation. Roy Jacuzzi, a grandson and nephew of the founders, studied industrial design and engineering at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1960s and spent his summers in the engineering department of the family firm, according to the 1985 profile. His idea was to move the pump outside a conventional tub and build the jets into the tub itself, so the bath became part of the bathroom rather than an appliance placed in it. In 1968, as he finished his final year, that whirlpool bath was introduced to the home-building market. A slightly larger version followed in 1969, and a two-person model in 1970. As more people wanted to share the water, the company moved on to the spa, which recirculated and heated the same treated water rather than being filled and drained each time.

Kidde, Hanson, U.S. Industries, Apollo, Investindustrial.

The family sold the business in 1979. The Chicago Tribune reported in 1985 that the firm had been sold that year to Walter Kidde & Co., and that Roy Jacuzzi, by then president of Kidde’s Jacuzzi Whirlpool Bath division, was the only family member who remained with it. Kidde did not keep it long as an independent owner: the Los Angeles Times reported on 6 August 1987 that the British group Hanson Trust had agreed to acquire Kidde, whose businesses it listed as including Jacuzzi whirlpool baths alongside Kidde fire extinguishers and Farberware cookware.

Hanson then spun the American businesses off. The San Francisco Chronicle, in a June 1999 business profile of Roy Jacuzzi, said that Jacuzzi’s parent, U.S. Industries, had been spun off from Hanson in 1995, and that its capital had funded a run of purchases. The same article listed them: Haugh Products, a Canadian maker of above-ground pools, in 1996; Sundance Spas in 1998; Zurn Industries, the plumbing maker, in 1998; and Gatsby Spa, bought in the week of the article. It also noted that Jacuzzi ran plants in Europe and South America and had opened a factory in Singapore the year before. English Wikipedia says U.S. Industries renamed itself Jacuzzi Brands in 2003.

Pool & Spa News reported on 1 November 2006 that Jacuzzi Brands Inc., then based in West Palm Beach, Florida, had agreed in October to be acquired by the New York private-equity firm Apollo Management, with the sale expected to close in the first quarter of 2007. Apollo said that the bath business, including portable spas, would become a separate company and that Zurn would go to Rexnord, another company in its portfolio. When the next sale came, Interior Design reported on 16 January 2019 that the European investment group Investindustrial had agreed to acquire Jacuzzi Brands from funds affiliated with Apollo Global Management, Ares Management and Clearlake Capital, with the Ohio design firm Nottingham Spirk Design Associates joining as a product-design partner and minority shareholder. Investindustrial has owned Jacuzzi since 2019.

Where the products are made has been reported in broad terms. Pool and Spa Scene, reporting the 2019 deal on 6 February, said the group had facilities across North America, Europe and South America, with its main European manufacturing facility in north-eastern Italy. The Orange County Business Journal reported in April 2022 that the business, by then called Jacuzzi Group, had moved its headquarters from Chino Hills to Irvine, California, while keeping its regional manufacturing facility in Chino Hills; the same report said the group also owned Sundance Spas and ThermoSpas.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make hot tubs and spas, and several also make swim spas, saunas or other products for the garden. Hot-tub and spa makers in general sit at many different points in the trade: some began as pool builders or as divisions of larger companies, some build in their home town and buy parts from elsewhere, and some now sit inside bigger groups that own several spa names at once.

A hot-tub brand usually carries its identity less through a single tub than through its logo, its series and model names, its catalogues and the dealer showrooms where the tubs are seen. The company behind the name may have changed owners, moved its production or grown well beyond the place where it started, so the plain questions behind each name are worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its tubs are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its identity has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A surname, a tub and a trademark.

Jacuzzi’s identity rests first on the name. The family surname has stayed on the product through every change of owner, and the 1985 Tribune profile observed that it was the Jacuzzi name, among the many whirlpool baths and hot tubs that followed, that had come to signify a luxurious, California-style way of living. English Wikipedia notes that the word is widely used for any hot tub in American English, while the Associated Press Stylebook lists Jacuzzi as a trademark for hot tubs, whirlpool spas and whirlpool baths.

The company’s own website now presents the brand under the line “Everything Else is Just Hot Water” and sells hot tubs, swim spas, saunas and bath remodelling under the Jacuzzi name, alongside its SmartTub system. The way the products reach buyers has also changed over time. The 1999 San Francisco Chronicle profile said the company had begun selling through home-improvement chains in the 1990s, a shift from the contractors and builders it had served before, and in 2022 the Orange County Business Journal described retailers as its main customer base, with training events for them held near the new Irvine headquarters. The same report mentioned a company store in Mission Viejo.

For a design guide, Jacuzzi shows how a family surname can outlast the family’s ownership and become the word people use for the whole category. Compare Sundance Spas, its sister hot-tub brand in the Jacuzzi Group, and Kohler, the Wisconsin bath maker that the 1999 Chronicle profile named as a competitor. For this guide we use a deep blue, an aqua and a warm stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Jacuzzi’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.