Business View Magazine | December 2020

111 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2020 MAAX SPAS INDUSTR I ES CORP . than this company has ever built before and we will meet our capacity,” O’Shea stresses. “There’s not a spa that we will build next year that won’t be delivered to a consumer’s backyard.” Many factors have contributed to the increased demand. People are congregating more at home and looking for more reasons to keep their family home; more reasons to have family visit them. Backyard spas fulfil many wants for families and, depending the product they choose, provide a communal gathering place where they can splash and play or simply relax and soak up the warmth of the soothing, circulating water. According to O’Shea, “One of the things our product offered a lot of consumers during this time was some anxiety relief, an opportunity to just relax and destress and be able to sleep at night. People didn’t want to be sitting on the couch all day long just watching TV, because they weren’t filming new TV shows. No movies were coming out, so they were looking at exercise equipment, hot tubs, swim spas.” MAAX Spas Industries Corp. is a leading designer and manufacturer of “Luxury Hot Water Products.” The Chandler, Arizona-based company offers 41 different spa models and 16 swim spa models through a worldwide network of over 350 dealers. American Whirlpool and Vita Spa are its two main brands. The company traces its roots back to 1969, with the founding of Modern Fiberglass and Metal, which produced snowmobile shrouds and swimming pools. For the next several decades, the company grew and expanded both its product line and its geographic footprint under the aegis of several different owners, eventually becoming a manufacturer of swim spas and hot tubs. Company President John Johnson relates some of the company’s history, “At the corporate level, MAAX was sold to a group of equity investors in 2003-04, and went from being a publicly-traded company to a privately-held company. We ran with them until 2008, when all of MAAX was purchased by a company called Brookfield, another private