A service technician’s idea, a Salt Lake City company.

Bullfrog Spas is the hot-tub brand of Bullfrog International, LC, a privately held company in Utah. Its own history begins not with a factory but with service calls. The company says its founder, David Ludlow, was the son of a pool builder and spent the late 1980s answering repair calls on hot tubs sold through his father’s business. Working on those tubs, he came to think that the jets and much of the plumbing could be moved out of the shell and into the seats themselves.

In 1989, the company says, Ludlow sketched a hot tub with modular jetted seat backs, each one holding a set of jets and the plumbing behind them. That idea became the JetPak, the part the brand still builds around. Bullfrog International was established in Salt Lake City in 1996, and the company says the Bullfrog Spas name was picked from suggestions made by its early employees and collaborators. Its first production spa was a six-seat model fitted with six JetPaks.

The first range followed in 1997. The company says that in that year it received its first patents, and showed six models at the National Spa and Pool Institute trade show in New Orleans. Because each JetPak sat in its own seat, an owner could choose which ones to fit and move them around later. A report by Jen Jacobson for Salt Lake City’s KSL, published on 9 June 2015, gave 1997 as the year Bullfrog Spas started, which matches the company’s account of its first models; the company itself dates its establishment to 1996.

Ludlow led the company in its early years. In February 2011 Bullfrog named Jerry Pasley as chief executive; the English Wikipedia entry on Bullfrog International, citing the company’s own announcement, says Pasley had previously been an executive vice president at Jacuzzi Hot Tubs and Sundance Spas. By September 2026 the chief executive was Dan Sjoblom, who had been the company’s marketing director when KSL visited the factory in 2015.

Salt Lake City, Bluffdale and Herriman.

Bullfrog builds its spas in Utah. The company says it moved into a new manufacturing plant in Bluffdale, south of Salt Lake City, in 2003. When KSL filmed there in June 2015, it described an assembly line that combined robots with hand finishing, and reported that the company had chosen to keep its jobs in the United States rather than move production abroad. Sjoblom told KSL that the jet-pack patent was the foundation of the business, and the report noted that each JetPak needs only a single opening in the shell, which leaves more room for foam in the cabinet.

Early in 2020 the company moved into a new headquarters in Herriman, Utah, with room for manufacturing, warehousing and offices under one roof. A press release Bullfrog issued for its 30th anniversary on 3 September 2026 said its spas are made at the Herriman headquarters, and that the Bluffdale plant had been converted to build the company’s swim spas after the Swim Series launched in 2022. The same release described Bullfrog International as privately held and said its spas are sold through authorised dealers in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, South America, the Caribbean and Europe.

The JetPak has travelled further than the factory. The company says that in 2003 it licensed JetPak technology to partners in Australia and New Zealand, and that the German-based ceramics and bathroom group Villeroy & Boch chose Bullfrog to build private-label spas for it. Bullfrog says the two companies later developed a spa design together called STIL, which it dates to 2015. The company also says it patented, in 2007, a base and support structure for its spas made from ABS and composite materials rather than wood.

The range has grown in series rather than one-off models. The company dates its A Series and R Series to 2013, together with a new air manifold it calls H2Air and a redesigned JetPak. The M Series followed in 2020, the Swim Series in 2022, and in 2023 the A Series was redesigned around what the company now calls the JetPak Therapy System and a filter arrangement it names Simplicity. The company’s 2017 retail programme, Power Per Square Foot, introduced interactive displays for dealers’ showrooms.

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 frog, a seat back and a series letter.

The brand’s name does much of its work. A bullfrog is a pond animal, and the company says the name came from suggestions by its early employees and collaborators. On the showroom floor the identity is carried less by a mascot than by the part that made the company: the JetPak, a removable seat back that dealers can lift out and show to buyers. The company’s own literature returns to that part again and again, from the first six-seat spa of 1996 to the redesigned A Series of 2023.

Product names follow a plain logic. Ranges are identified by a letter and the word Series — the A, R and M Series among them — while the swim spas sit under the Swim Series name, and STIL marks the line developed with Villeroy & Boch. That letter system lets a dealer explain the catalogue as a ladder of shells that all share the same swappable seats. The company’s 2017 Power Per Square Foot programme extended the same idea into retail, turning dealers’ display floors into a branded space with interactive displays.

Where the spas are made is also part of the story the brand tells. KSL’s 2015 report framed Bullfrog as a Utah manufacturer that had kept its jobs in the United States, and the company’s 2026 anniversary release again tied the brand to its Herriman factory.

For a design guide, Bullfrog Spas shows how a single engineered part — a seat back full of jets — can become the centre of a brand, its patents and its showroom. Compare Sundance Spas, where its 2011 chief executive had worked, and Jacuzzi, Sundance’s sister brand. For this guide we use a pond green, a lily-pad green and a pale mist with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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