Balloons, airships and an inflatable boat.

The Zodiac name on a pool cleaner began over a balloon. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1896 as Mallet, Mélandri et de Pitray by Maurice Mallet and his associates, making hydrogen balloons for sport and tourism. In 1909, it says, the business changed its name to Zodiac, and it went on to build aircraft and airships, notably for the French naval balloon service.

The turn towards water came through rubberised fabric. English Wikipedia’s article on Zodiac Nautic says that in the late 1930s a Zodiac engineer, Pierre Debroutelle, developed prototypes of inflatable boats, and that in 1937 the French naval air arm, the Aéronavale, ordered several from the company. Sales to the general public followed in 1949. The boats gained wide attention in late 1952, when Alain Bombard crossed the Atlantic in a production Zodiac he named L’Hérétique, and again in the late 1960s, when Jacques Cousteau carried Zodiac boats aboard the Calypso. The same article says that in France “zodiac” became a generic word for an inflatable boat.

Pools came later. The brand’s European pool site says that Zodiac Pool Care Europe was created in 1998 to handle operations related to pool maintenance and water quality, and that its work is to design, manufacture and sell equipment for swimming pools. That pool business is the one that carries the Zodiac name today; the boat company and the aerospace company went separate ways, as the next decade showed.

Carlyle, Rhône and a merger with Fluidra.

The split came in 2007. English Wikipedia says that on 28 September 2007 the Zodiac group and the American investment firm Carlyle announced Zodiac Marine & Pool, combining Zodiac’s marine and pool division with the pool division of Water Pik Technologies, which included Jandy Pool Products. Carlyle held the majority. The remaining group, it says, was renamed Zodiac Aerospace in early 2008, and was acquired by the French aerospace company Safran in 2018.

Zodiac Marine & Pool did not stay whole. According to English Wikipedia, it sold its liferaft business to the British group Survitec in 2010, and at the end of 2012 it was divided in three: the leisure boats went to OpenGate Capital as Zodiac Marine, the military and professional boats went to Oaktree Capital, and the pool-equipment companies, as Zodiac Pool Solutions, stayed with Carlyle. The investment firm Rhône says on its own website that it acquired the US-based pool equipment maker Zodiac in December 2016, and that Zodiac and Fluidra signed a definitive agreement in November 2017 to merge in exchange for stock.

The merger closed in July 2018. A press release dated Barcelona, 2 July 2018, and published by Fluidra’s Benelux company, says the two had closed the merger announced in November 2017 and that the combined company would keep the Fluidra name and its Spanish stock-exchange listing. SPLASH magazine reported on 4 July 2018 that the global headquarters would stay in Sabadell, near Barcelona, with the North American headquarters in Vista, California; that Fluidra’s Eloi Planes would be executive chairman and former Zodiac chief executive Bruce Brooks chief executive; and that, as a condition of European Commission approval, Fluidra would sell its Aquatron robotic-cleaner unit. Australasian Leisure Management reported the same week that regulators in Australia and New Zealand had approved the deal in April.

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.

One name among several in a Spanish pool group.

Inside Fluidra, Zodiac is one brand in a portfolio rather than the company name. English Wikipedia says Fluidra was founded in 1969 in Barcelona by the Planes, Serra, Corbera and Garrigós families as Astral Construcciones Metálicas, that it listed on the Spanish stock exchange in 2007 and that it joined the IBEX 35 index in March 2021. Its business, the same article says, is equipment to build, upgrade and maintain swimming pools, from filtration and pumping to disinfection, lighting and heating. Australasian Leisure Management named AstralPool, Polaris and CTX Professional among the brands the merged company brought together.

Zodiac’s own European site shows where the name now sits. Its product menu runs from residential and commercial robotic cleaners and cordless models to heat pumps, heat exchangers, filtration equipment and pumps, water treatment with salt chlorination and a system it calls MagnaPool, and dehumidifiers for indoor pools. The site is offered in country versions across Europe and in Turkey, and its “About us” page leans on the company’s history, describing a journey that took it “to the skies and then to water”.

The name has since outlived each of its earlier owners. The boats sail on separately under Zodiac Nautic, and the aerospace business became part of Safran, while the pool equipment carries the word on lids, labels and control panels. For a design guide, Zodiac shows how a heritage name can travel across categories: the brand that once meant balloons and then inflatable boats now marks pool robots and heat pumps, held by a Spanish group with several other pool names. Compare it with Polaris, its Fluidra stablemate in pool cleaners, and with its rival Hayward. For this guide we use blue, navy and signal yellow with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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