Costa Mesa, Chino and acrylic shells.

Sundance Spas is a Southern California maker of acrylic hot tubs. Its own company text, repeated in the trade directories of Pool & Spa News and Aquatics International, dates the business to 1979, when it says it opened its first manufacturing facility in Costa Mesa, California. The company describes the spas it has made since then as portable and in-ground hot tubs with acrylic shells, sold with a range of accessories. Those same directory listings give the firm’s current address as Chino, California under the name Sundance Spas, Inc.

The company has long sold through independent dealers rather than directly. On its careers page Sundance Spas says it trains dealers and technicians around the world through business-management and technical-service seminars, and its website is built around a dealer locator, brochure requests and quote forms rather than an online checkout. The site is published in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German and Polish versions.

For its first two decades the business was independent. The figure most associated with it in the trade press is Jonathan Clark, whom Pool & Spa News identified in November 2006 as president and chief executive of Sundance Spas Inc./Jacuzzi Spas International. Speaking that year, Clark described the change that came when the company joined a larger group: “We went from a small, entrepreneurial firm to a larger firm that could supply us some of our capital needs for expansion.” He also said he was continuing to plan a plant in Eastern Europe and to expand the product line and the dealer base.

Into Jacuzzi in 1998, and on through every owner since.

The change of ownership came in 1998. The San Francisco Chronicle, in a June 1999 profile of Roy Jacuzzi, referred to the 1998 purchase of Sundance Spas by Jacuzzi Inc., and the November 2006 Pool & Spa News report repeated that Jacuzzi Inc. had bought Sundance Spas in 1998. At the time Jacuzzi itself belonged to U.S. Industries, the American group that Hanson had spun off in 1995, and the Chronicle described how Jacuzzi was combining its spa purchases, fitting its own pump systems into tub lines that had used rivals’ pumps and buying raw materials such as acrylic on a larger scale. Gatsby Spa joined the same group in 1999.

From then on Sundance followed its parent through each sale. Pool & Spa News reported on 1 November 2006 that Jacuzzi Brands Inc., which it described as the parent company of Sundance Spas Inc./Jacuzzi Spas International, had agreed to be acquired by the private-equity firm Apollo Management, and that Apollo planned to run the bath business, including the portable spa business, as a separate company. In February 2019 Pool and Spa Scene reported that an investment subsidiary of Investindustrial had agreed to acquire Jupiter Holding Corporation, the owner of the Jacuzzi brands, and listed the brands included in the deal: Jacuzzi, Sundance, Dimension One Spas, Hydropool, ThermoSpas and BathWraps. Investindustrial has owned the group, and with it Sundance Spas, since 2019.

The group itself has since taken the name Jacuzzi Group. The Orange County Business Journal reported in April 2022 that Jacuzzi Group owned the Jacuzzi trademark and also owned Sundance Spas and ThermoSpas, and that it had moved its headquarters from Chino Hills to Irvine, California, keeping its regional manufacturing facility in Chino Hills. The 2019 Pool and Spa Scene report said the wider group had manufacturing facilities across North America, Europe and South America. Sundance Spas, Inc. is still listed at its address in Chino.

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.

Numbered series and named jets.

Sundance Spas organises its range by number. The company’s website groups its hot tubs into the 980 Series, 880 Series, 780 Series and 680 Series, with swim spas alongside, and each series is described in a short line of copy aimed at a particular kind of owner, from entertaining guests to keeping things simple. The numbered names give the catalogue a clear order: a buyer can see at a glance where a model sits in the range without needing to learn a list of invented names, and the same numbers carry across the brochure, the website and the dealer’s showroom floor.

Around the numbers, the brand leans on named features. The site promotes what it calls its patented Fluidix jets and the SmartTub system, a feature name that also appears on the Jacuzzi site, and it gives the company’s registered name with a registered-trademark sign, as Sundance® Spas, throughout its pages. Its navigation is arranged by the buyer’s situation — spas for small spaces, for families, for cold climates, for entertaining — rather than by technical specification. With the products sold through dealers, much of the brand is seen in showrooms and in printed and downloadable brochures, which the site offers to every visitor alongside a dealer search.

For a design guide, Sundance Spas shows how a hot-tub maker can keep a distinct name and catalogue inside a larger group, using numbered series and named features to set itself apart from its sister brand. Compare Jacuzzi, the brand that has owned it since 1998, and Hot Spring Spas, another California hot-tub maker. For this guide we use a deep teal, a sundown orange and a sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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