bepps

Installment number 3 to answer the question that people have when viewing my cam of "what the hell is beppo doing there at work?" For previous entries click here

About a year after we started making spas for Sundance Howard decided he wanted to make his own spas and market them under his own label. At first Howard set his sights squarely at Sundances market. He asked me to design him up a round spa that would compete with theirs but would be the best spa yet made. I designed up pretty good one, I thought. It was absolutely beautiful. The lines just flowed perfectly and it looked like a sculpture that should be in a museum. Then Howard said "well let's make it do this, let's make it do that, let's have this on it and that on it and all this other stuff. I was able to tack in all the things that he wanted and still keep the thing looking really good and even simplify the construction of it to where it was going to cost half of what it did to build the Sundance spas.

After that was designed up he got Ken working on building the tooling for it and a few months later we saw my spa in plastic.

I never really saw targeting Sundances market as a very good idea. Neither did Sundance, it seemed, `cause shortly after we showed up at a spa convention with our own booth they pulled their line from us and never bought another spa shell from us again. But that spa itself wasn't in the best of market sector. Sundance was struggling to move their products as it was and adding another vendor to the marketplace just wasn't gonna help things. I think in the two years since we've got the initial plastic from the mold we've probably sold like 400 round spas.

Here's the round spa in its raw molded state before it gets trimmed up and has all the bits added in.



We do have rigid covers molded up for it but I haven't finished the mold for the arms that hold them on. There's also a bunch of sealing issues that will need to be solved. I designed up a different design concept that followed the contour of the spa. I thought was very elegant and beautiful but Howard thought the mold would be too big and expensive so we went with the other arm design.

The mold I did build, by the way, needs about 15 more hours of work to be finished (after I worked on it for around 6 weeks to get it to where it is). Once I finish it we can start putting round covers on the round spa but Howard stopped me from finishing it to move onto another emergency rush job and rather than put me back on it said he'd prefer I work on some other project. It's been like a year and I still haven't gotten to touch that mold. That's just how they roll there.