By Adam Pack
Almost Heaven Saunas has ridden a wave of success over recent years straight into a massive new facility. Almost Heaven, which has operated exclusively out of their Renick shop until now, produces stand alone saunas for direct sale, but also ships a majority of its inventory to Costco to be sold in pre-made fashion in stores nationwide. Aside from big box retailers and direct customer orders, there is a healthy taste for saunas made in Lewisburg all over the world.
Production Manager and Foreman Jonathon Alderman said, “We have saunas from this factory all over the world, they especially love them in Japan, we ship them there a lot.”
The company, now a subsidiary of Harvia USA (a heating component manufacturer), has moved into the new facility as of this year after spending considerable time renovating the inside and opening up the shop floor.
“It was a full scale job, bringing forklifts in here to take down and pull down walls in order to create space for manufacturing machinery,” said Alderman.
As of now, the factory employs upwards of 50 people, and has recently added another shift and nearly 20 new employees to accommodate the seemingly voracious demand coming from the global sauna market. According to Alderman, “We can just barely fill the order for Costco; across the country, you think about it, it’s not hard at all for them to sell 50 in a day.”
The process of constructing a sauna is very labor intensive, but the new Lewisburg factory has all the latest bells and whistles in the woodworking industry, from CNC routers to hydraulic clamp tables to laser-precise auto-saws, able to calculate the necessary lengths of various boards on a project via categories input by a technician, cutting through them in turn with blistering pace.
Looking around at the shiny new plant, things surely are looking for Almost Heaven Saunas, as people all over the world are looking for the fine cedar saunas manufactured right here in Lewisburg.
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