Maine Cedar Hot Tubs
Maine Cedar Hot Tubs Featured on Bachelor Winter Games | February 2018
By Maria Landry
On Feb. 15, 2018, more than three million people from around the country glimpsed a cedar hot tub crafted right here in Skowhegan.
The tub—a 5′ x 3′ wood-fired natural cedar beauty—was made by local company Maine Cedar Hot Tubs. How did millions of people happen to see it? The tub was featured on The Bachelor Winter Games, a winter-sports-themed spinoff of popular reality TV series The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.
“We went to the Hermitage Club in Vermont and set it up on a Friday. [The show] had their art department come over on Saturday and make it look like it belonged in the spot it was in,” said Brandi Meisner, who does marketing for Maine Cedar Hot Tubs. Her husband, Nahum, runs the company with his parents, Steve and Marcia, who founded it around 2000.
“Steve is the very definition of an entrepreneur,” Meisner said. “He and Marcia have done a bunch of different products over the years. They happened to see a wood-fired hot tub somewhere, and he thought, ‘We can make those.’ They were looking to diversify their product offering, and so they made one for themselves as a test and started selling them.”
Now the tubs pretty much sell themselves. Maine Cedar Hot Tubs has shipped tubs all over the country and even internationally to Turks & Caicos and Italy.
Though they’ve sold to TV personalities and famous musicians, having a tub on The Bachelor Winter Games was the company’s most public brush with fame.
“It was cool to be on set all day and see how that works,” Meisner said, noting that hours on set yielded only minutes of footage that ended up in the show. For the hot tub scene, reality TV stars Luke Pell and Stassi Yaramchuk “took a horse-drawn carriage in. It was very romantic, definitely made for TV.”
Maine Cedar Hot Tubs is the only cedar hot tub company on the East Coast, and they offer both wood-fired and electric versions. They use high-end materials including red cedar from the West Coast.
“Everything else we try to do as local as possible because we’re local and we want to support local,” Meisner said. “Our white cedar comes from the Katahdin Forest Products Company. Our higher-end tubs are very custom. For the Super R tubs, the rim generally has some type of really unique wood like birdseye. That all gets hand-selected by Nahum and comes from the Maine Woods Company.”
The Super R tubs she mentioned take more than 300 hours to create and are, according to Meisner, the “crème de la crème.” A Super R tub “is coated in epoxy, and it looks like it’s encased in glass essentially and just has a really beautiful look. It’s not as rustic as the natural cedar tubs.”
The natural cedar tubs are available as double-walled or single-walled; Meisner says the latter is a popular option in cities, where skyscrapers and narrow doors often make installing a traditional hot tub impossible.
“We can take [the single-walled tub] in pieces and put it together on site,” Meisner explained. “We’ve done this in New York City several times.”
The company’s cedar tubs have also found their way into gardens around the country.
“It fits into a landscape,” Meisner said. “It has that rustic elegance that other tubs don’t have. And people like that it’s custom.”
Some customers ask how practical wood hot tubs are; Meisner says they “absolutely are” practical.
“They actually tend to be more durable than fiberglass, and they’re more aesthetically pleasing,” she said. “Because they’re custom, we go through every detail with the client. People like that. No one’s going to have a tub that’s exactly like theirs. There’s no floor model that you can just go in and say, ‘I want that.'”
With so much time and care taken with each tub, and with word spreading about the company, Maine Cedar Hot Tubs has grown quite a bit in the past year.
“We hired two full and another part-time person,” Meisner said. “We now have eight full-time people and two part time. It’s good for the economy. It’s good for the people around here.”
The Meisners also run Skowhegan Wooden Rule Company, where they craft timeline growth rulers for measuring children’s height and marking milestones and special events.
For more information, visit MaineCedarTubs.com, check out their Facebook page, or call 207-474-0953.
For more on Skowhegan Wooden Rule, visit SkowheganWoodenRule.com or see their Facebook page.
