From a 1994 Shanghai company to a Hong Kong listing.

Bestway is a name most people meet on a box: an above-ground pool, an airbed, an inflatable hot tub or a paddling pool for the garden. The business behind it traces its start to Shanghai. A joint announcement filed with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 25 June 2021 describes Shanghai Bestway Plastic Products Co., Ltd. as having been established in 1994 and as the predecessor of the group. The company’s own “About Us” page gives the same founding year for Bestway Global Holding Inc., which it describes as a multinational corporation with a global operations network.

The same 2021 filing sets out what the group does in plain terms. It says the company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, that its shares were then listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong exchange under stock code 3358, and that the group is principally engaged in the manufacturing and sale of PVC sporting and leisure products in Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, including mainland China, and other markets. Bestway says on its website that the listing took place in November 2017.

The filing also names the people who controlled the business. It describes the company as ultimately controlled by Mr. Zhu, its chairman, chief executive and an executive director, and names Zhu Qiang as the sole director of the offeror company that proposed to take Bestway private.

A Cayman scheme, a court sanction and a withdrawn listing.

Bestway’s time as a listed company was short. The June 2021 announcement set out a proposal to take the company private by a scheme of arrangement under the company law of the Cayman Islands, with the shares of outside holders cancelled in exchange for cash. The offeror was Great Success Enterprises Holdings Limited, which the filing says was controlled by Mr. Zhu. A further joint announcement dated 8 October 2021 says the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands sanctioned the scheme on 30 September 2021, that the scheme became effective on 7 October 2021, and that the listing of the shares would be withdrawn at 9:00 a.m. on 12 October 2021. On its own site the company describes the result as a privatisation and delisting funded by its founder.

The business that remained private is spread across several regions. Bestway says it runs research and development departments in Europe, the United States, Shanghai and Shenzhen, staffed by industrial designers, product designers, engineers and product managers. It says it wholly owns its production facilities, which it places in the Yangtze River Delta in China and in Southeast Asia. Its website links to a European sales company, Bestway Europe S.r.l., in Italy.

The product range is wider than pools. The company’s site groups its catalogue into above-ground pools and accessories, hot tubs and accessories, recreation products, sporting products, home furnishing products such as airbeds, swim trainers and swim gear, camping, trampolines and inflatable water parks. Among the line names its hot-tub pages use are Lay-Z-Spa and SaluSpa, and the site also carries the H2OGO! name for water-play products. Bestway says it offers after-sales service through regional centres, and its global site asks owners to register products and look up a serial number before claiming under warranty.

Lay-Z-Spa’s UK website (lay-z-spa.co.uk, accessed October 2026) sorts its range into inflatable, foam and rigid-wall hot tubs. The model names on the site pair a place with a jet system, such as the Helsinki AirJet, the Milan AirJet Plus and the Santorini HydroJet Pro. Bestway’s global site has a country and region selector, product registration and a help page on finding a product’s serial number, and its customer-service panel is also written in Chinese. The October 2021 Hong Kong announcement says the cheques for cancelled shares would be sent out by 19 October 2021.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the equipment behind water at home: pool pumps, filters and cleaners, above-ground pools, water-softening and filtering systems, and the tanks and tankless units that heat water for kitchens and bathrooms. Brands in these trades sit at many different points in the market, from names that began as small family workshops to labels that now belong to much larger industrial groups, and the same badge can be sold through a pool shop, a plumbing wholesaler or a big retailer.

Because the products are often installed out of sight, in a pump room, a basement or a utility cupboard, a brand’s identity in these fields tends to be carried by its name, its labels and its packaging rather than by the product’s shape. Ownership can change several times while a familiar badge stays on the box, which makes the plain questions worth asking: who started the brand, who owns it now, and where its products are made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A slogan, several line names and a box on the shelf.

Bestway’s visual identity is carried as much by its packaging and line names as by its logo. The company’s global website is titled with the slogan “Live It Up”, and its mission statement speaks of “happiness first” and a “world full of joy”. The site’s own style sheets load several web typefaces, among them Cocogoose, Raleway, Titillium and Noto Sans.

Much of the brand’s recognition comes through sub-brands that sit on the box beside the Bestway name. Lay-Z-Spa is the inflatable hot-tub line that has its own website in the United Kingdom, while SaluSpa appears on Bestway’s hot-tub pages for other markets. The legal name in the site’s copyright line is Bestway Inflatables & Material Corp..

The 2021 filings give the ownership picture that sits behind the identity: a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, with its roots in Shanghai, controlled by its chairman and taken off the Hong Kong exchange in October 2021. For a design guide, Bestway shows how a manufacturer can let its product lines do the branding work: the pool, the hot tub and the airbed each carry a line name on the carton, while the parent name stays constant across all of them. Compare it with Intex, another maker of above-ground pools and inflatables, and with the pool-equipment approach of Zodiac. For this guide we use pool blue, deep blue and sun yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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