Business View Magazine | December 2020

114 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2020 how they deal with vendors and how they deal as a conglomerate. It was very helpful to be part of ABG always, and particularly during 2020.” Company suppliers are also credited with keeping MAAX Spas positive and focused as others in the industry struggled to survive COVID-19. “We’ve always relied on our suppliers, our vendors, for a number of categories in product development, quality of product, and so on, and during this recent pandemic we had to rely on our vendors on a different level, in a different way,” relates O’Shea. “Our relationships with our suppliers, our vendors and our dealers and customers have strengthened during this time. It’s been very difficult for everybody and we would not have been able to survive this situation without all of them.” MAAX Spas’ own company “family” went over and above to lend a hand whenever they could. “Where a lot of people were afraid to leave the house, our employees were in the factory and they worked hard; they helped us get through this to a point where they were working hours upon hours and doing a fantastic job,” O’Shea equity group based out of Canada. Brookfield separated the spa division from the bath division and created two separate companies. As a stand- alone company under Brookfield, we acquired Vita Spa out of Florida in 2009, and moved their manufacturing from Florida to here in Arizona. In December 2014, we acquired a company called L.A. Spas and we moved the manufacturing from that facility in Anaheim into the facility in Chandler. We continued to be under Brookfield until January 2017, when both MAAX Spas and MAAX Bath were acquired by the American Bath Group, who owns us today. We’re still known as MAAX Spas, but we are now a division of American Bath Group.” Being part of ABG helped MAAX Spas retain its foothold and continue production in the wake of the pandemic. O’Shea notes, “American Bath Group has done a fantastic job over the past couple of years with helping us cost our product properly and with our supplier negotiations. During this difficult time there was a lot of security in being part of American Bath Group – how they deal with employees,