Thirty years ago, Bullfrog Spas didn’t start with a grand vision. It started with a young man fixing leaks.
In 1989, Dave Ludlow asked his father, a pool builder, if the family business could start selling hot tubs too, since demand for them was picking up. His father said yes, on one condition: Dave would handle every single service call himself.
It turned out to be an education. Hour after hour, Dave found himself troubleshooting leaks, swapping out equipment, and walking frustrated customers through maintenance headaches. But somewhere in all those repair jobs, a pattern started to emerge. The problems he kept running into weren’t random bad luck. They were baked into how the industry built hot tubs in the first place, from fixed plumbing to standardized designs, with the same weak points showing up again and again.
Most people in his position would have just kept fixing things. Dave started asking why the tubs were built that way at all.
An Idea That Became a Company
That question eventually led to something new: a removable, interchangeable jetted seat back that let owners swap out and personalize their massage experience, instead of being locked into one fixed plumbing configuration for the life of the spa. It was a genuinely different way of thinking about hot tub design, simpler to build, easier to service, and far more flexible for the person actually using it.
The idea became the JetPak Therapy System, patented and refined over the years since. In 1996, it also became a company: Bullfrog Spas. The first JetPak-equipped hot tubs hit the market the following year.
The shift mattered on a few different levels. For customers, it meant a hot tub was no longer one-size-fits-all. They could choose the massage configuration that actually suited them and change it later if their needs shifted. For dealers, it gave them something genuinely different to sell in a crowded market. And for the industry more broadly, it was a signal that innovation in spas didn’t have to be cosmetic. It could solve real, everyday problems.
Scaling Up
Word spread. By the early 2000s, Bullfrog Spas was one of the fastest-growing companies in Utah, building a reputation among dealers, service techs, and customers across North America.
In 2003, the company opened a manufacturing facility in Bluffdale, Utah, to keep pace with its expanding dealer network, and it kept investing not just in new products, but in training and support for the retailers selling them. That thinking eventually crystallized into “Power Per Square Foot,” a retail success program launched in 2017 that covers everything from marketing and sales process to inventory and financial management, backed by in-person training for sales and service teams. The underlying logic was simple: dealers who succeed make the whole company succeed.
The 2010s brought new product lines, including the A Series, STIL, and X Series, and continued growth eventually justified a new, 286,000-square-foot headquarters in Herriman, Utah, which opened in 2020. That same year, the company launched the M Series®, a premium line aimed at combining serious functionality with a more elevated look and feel.
The product lineup kept expanding after that. In 2022, Bullfrog Spas moved into swim spas with the Swim Series®, stretching its approach to hydrotherapy and wellness into a new category. A redesigned A Series® followed in 2023, with upgraded controls, jet technology, and JetPak options. More recently, the company has been building out warehouse and distribution operations in Europe, laying groundwork for growth beyond North America.
The People Part of the Story
Products and facilities are the visible part of the story, but they’re not really the whole thing. Employees who’ve stuck around for years, sometimes decades, dealer partners bringing the brand into new communities across North America, Europe, and beyond, suppliers who’ve helped the company scale, and customers whose feedback keeps shaping what gets built next: that’s the less visible infrastructure behind three decades of growth.
CEO Dan Sjoblom frames the company’s mission, “Create Peaceful Lives,” as a response to something he sees people looking for more broadly: meaningful ways to connect, for families and individuals everywhere.
What Comes Next
Thirty years in, the company says its focus going forward hasn’t really changed, even if the specifics have. Personalized therapy, more durable engineering, better energy efficiency, elevated design, simpler water care, and products that are genuinely different rather than just incrementally updated.
It’s a fairly unglamorous formula when you say it plainly: stay close to what customers actually deal with, question why things are done a certain way, and don’t stop there. But it’s more or less the same instinct that sent a young Dave Ludlow out on service calls in 1989, before any of this existed. Three decades later, that instinct is still doing the work.
