Fort Wayne Pools, Bob Lauter and a group of investors.

Master Spas is a hot-tub and swim-spa maker based in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It did not start from nothing. In February 1996, according to the company’s own account published for its thirtieth anniversary in February 2026, Bob Lauter and a group of investors acquired the spa division of Fort Wayne Pools, a local pool company, and that division became Master Spas. The trade title Pool & Spa Marketing, reporting on the company’s twenty-fifth anniversary in May 2021, gave the same origin: Master Spas was founded in 1996 when Lauter and investors bought Fort Wayne Pools’ spa division, together with a production facility. The same report said Fort Wayne Pools had been making acrylic spas since the late 1970s, so the new company inherited a working factory and staff who already knew the product.

Lauter is described in both sources as a co-founder. The other co-founder named by the company is Terry Valmassoi; a Master Spas history page says that Lauter and Valmassoi “were no strangers to the spa industry” when they began. Their titles have changed over the years. In the 2021 Pool & Spa Marketing report, Lauter was chief executive and Valmassoi president. In the February 2026 anniversary post, Valmassoi was named as chief executive and Kevin Richards, who had been vice-president of marketing and sales in 2021, as president, while Lauter was still credited as co-founder.

The company has stayed in Fort Wayne throughout. Its 2026 anniversary post describes a manufacturing campus in the city, and the company’s history page says the operation grew from a single building into a campus with its own distribution centre, adding a dedicated swim-spa manufacturing facility in an expansion in 2018. The 2021 Pool & Spa Marketing report described that Fort Wayne campus as the company’s main operation and named the wider leadership team of the time, including Mike Reese as vice-president of manufacturing and Nathan Coehlo as vice-president of engineering. No change of ownership is recorded in the sources since the 1996 purchase.

Hot tubs, swim spas, and the work of naming them.

Master Spas’ products fall into two main groups: hot tubs and swim spas, the longer tubs fitted with a current that a person can swim or exercise against. In 2026 the company also listed cold tubs and saunas. Each group is divided into series with names of their own. A company history page lists the Twilight Series and Clarity hot tubs, the Getaway hot tubs, described by the company as compact plug-and-play models, and H2X swim spas, which it presents as a fitness-focused line. The website’s menu in 2026 added the Michael Phelps Legend Series of hot tubs, the LH Series, the Michael Phelps Signature swim spas, and two newer names with a playful turn, the Chilly GOAT cold tubs and the Sweaty GOAT saunas.

The most visible of these names is that of the American swimmer Michael Phelps. Master Spas says it partnered with Phelps in 2010, and his name has since been attached to a hot-tub series and a swim-spa series. The 2026 anniversary post describes it as a long-standing collaboration that has strengthened the brand. The partnership gives the company an identity built around swimming as much as soaking, and it ties the swim spas to a recognisable figure from the sport.

On where the products are made, the company makes two related statements. Its February 2026 anniversary post says Master Spas builds its spas in the USA using both domestic and foreign components, and its history page says every hot tub, swim spa, cold tub and sauna is still made in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Both are the company’s own statements. The products are sold through dealers, and the company’s pages direct buyers to a dealer locator rather than to a single shop.

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 new logo for the thirtieth year.

The clearest dated change to Master Spas’ visual identity came in its thirtieth year. In the February 2026 anniversary post the company said it had unveiled a new corporate logo and a refreshed brand identity to mark the occasion. The same post, and its headline, wrote the company name as a single word, MasterSpas, where the 2021 trade coverage and older company pages used two words.

Much of the identity sits in the product names. The series names lean on settings and moods, from Twilight and Clarity to Getaway, while the swim-spa lines borrow the language of sport: the H2X name, and the series that carry Michael Phelps’ name. The two GOAT names for cold tubs and saunas bring a lighter tone into the same catalogue. The company’s history page describes the business as having grown from a single building into a campus, and the Fort Wayne location is repeated across its pages.

For a design guide, Master Spas shows how a manufacturer can tie a long-running product family to a sports partnership while keeping a home town at the centre of its story, and how a thirtieth anniversary can be the moment to redraw the corporate mark. Compare Harvia, the Finnish sauna-heater maker, and Kohler, the Wisconsin kitchen and bath company. For this guide we use a lane blue, a swim aqua and a gold with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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