In February, a ribbon cutting was held for Almost Heaven Saunas’ opening in the former ABB building in Lewisburg. The company moved in the week before Thanksgiving in 2021, and since then has nearly doubled the number of saunas they produce.
The following is Almost Heaven Saunas’ story, as told by George Chesebro, chief operations manager. It has been edited for clarity and narrative flow.
The company actually started in Renick in 1976. It’s been in Greenbrier County for over 40 years. We own that property still, but we just ran out of space. We’ve had extremely strong growth in the company over the past three years, and just had reached a point that we needed more to be able to continue to grow the way we want it to.
In those days, shortly after acquisition, we were producing probably 10 to 12 saunas a day.
Now that we’ve done a lot of process improvements, added a lot of equipment, moved into this much larger facility, today we’re producing somewhere between 35 and 45 saunas a day.
We actually moved in the week before Thanksgiving. We shut down our operations in Renick on a Wednesday evening, then started operations here in Lewisburg on Monday. In four days, we moved the entire company. That’s a big task. We worked with some trucking contractors here locally from West Virginia who assisted us in the moving process, but our employees are the ones who did the move. It was extremely impressive.
I think everybody from the top down is extremely pleased. It’s a much more professional facility, cleaner, lighter, brighter. We have a big break room facility for the employees, a lot more parking space, much better access to the interstate for shipping.
Some of the long-term employees just never would have imagined that we would have been here. We have an employee who was recently presented with a gift for 40 years with the company. If you talk to them, they’re like, “I would have never seen this coming.” Her name is Tonja Mothes.
As far as employees, prior to the move here to this facility, we would have grown to the upper 30s, low 40s. Today, we’re employing slightly over 60 people here. We have been able to add on a fair amount of people to help us do the expansion. At the beginning of February, we added a second shift. Pretty much, it’s all full-time positions.
Most of the material we use is western red cedar, so it’s produced on the West Coast, ironically, and transported here to West Virginia. We use it because of its durability in the outdoor environment. The cedar has a natural insect and rot resistance, so the saunas have a good longevity.
There is no adhesive in the saunas. The reason is because they get so hot that if you were to use glue and adhesives, they would put off gas. We use mechanical fasteners, such as nails and banding to hold it together. We call those our barrel saunas, and it’s the same idea as a bourbon barrel.
We also have soaking tubs – it’s like a jacuzzi with no jets to it, but it requires no electricity. It’s heated and fired through wood. The thermals from the wood are what heats and circulates the water. It takes about an hour to get the water up to temperature, similar to what you would have in a hot tub.
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| The barrel sauna (left) and the wood-heated soaking tub (right). |
We, as a company, are pretty aggressive about how we want to continue to grow. In the near future, our plans are such that we’re going to have to hire additional people. I think we’ll continue to be a strong employer in Greenbrier County, and the surrounding counties going forward.
Almost Heaven has gone through a couple of different owners over those years. Most recently, in 2019, it was purchased by a company called Harvia.
Harvia is a Finnish company who manufactures sauna heaters. Almost Heaven Saunas was their largest customer in the United States. I think, as a group, at this moment, Harvia is the largest sauna company in the world. It was a good fit for both companies, for them to acquire us here in the U.S.
Shortly afterwards, they hired me. I’ve been with a company for three years. My background is actually in forestry, but I did have some experience in management and operations for a company such as this. That’s what drew them to me.
We’ve been shipping out, you know, much larger orders of 15, 20, 30 heaters at a time to customers of Harvia here in the U.S. We ship to pretty much the entire United States, as well as globally. Since Harvia’s acquisition, I think that we’ve really diversified where we sell within the United States. It used to be very heavy on the west coast, but we’ve been able to really spread out that distribution with the United States.
We have customers as far out as Japan, Australia, Austria. We have divisions in eight or nine different countries around the world. This little piece of business here in West Virginia, as part of a much bigger company, has reach all the way across the globe. It’s pretty impressive and pretty cool to come as part of something like that.
Because we have this nice new facility that has a lot more room, this is going to be the distribution hub for all of Harvia’s products in the United States. Not only are we manufacturing a lot of stuff here, we’re also importing products from the other companies within our group and distributing them within the United States. That’s been a good shot in the arm for the business also. And, you know, this facility is what allowed us to start to do that.
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| The Almost Heaven Saunas warehouse. |
We have really good partnerships with some trucking companies that come in every evening. Around three in the afternoon, trucks are starting to roll in, and then we’ll get those shipped out on a daily basis. Most of our Saunas are not built for inventory – we build them, they’re going out the door.
I think the pandemic was extremely good for our business. Our saunas are designed for residential use, we shipped directly to the homeowner. We really fit well into those people that were looking for something smaller that they could have at their own house because they couldn’t during the pandemic. For the last two years, everybody has been doing home improvements around their backyard, and our products fit very well into that outdoor living space.
You can purchase directly through the website [almostheaven.com]. We can be found on the websites for Costco, Wayfair, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Walmart. We have quite a diverse sales channel where people can find our products.
