Our Story
Ancient Finnish traditions, meet modern technology & progress
No country on Earth has an unbroken tradition of sauna quite like Finland.
Sauna is the only Finnish word that we use in the English language, there is evidence of saunas there dating back as far as 10,000 years, and for every 10 Finns, there are 6 saunas. No other country on Earth loves saunas as much as the Finns. Period.
Our founders, Sami Rintala and Tom Bacon, bring this Finnish pedigree. Sami is an architect, widely considered the best sauna designer in the world with sauna projects in over 10 countries. Tom is a Brit that moved to Finland, fell in love with sauna culture and decided to bring it back with him.
Our mission is to make sauna culture accessible to the world, one sauna at a time.
After graduating from the Helsinki School of Architecture, Sami quickly creates a niche by designing & building his first public sauna, a floating sauna in Bergen, Norway. He will go on to build floating saunas in Denmark, Estonia and Russia as well.
In his cottage in Rognan, Northern Norway, Sami creates a new design of sauna that the Finnish press dub the world’s best sauna, since it’s natural air flow creates a sauna that almost entirely self-cleans.
Among the commercial projects Sami leads around the world, he designs a huge sauna called Salt that starts in Northern Norway and then is moved to the middle of Oslo’s new cultural centre.
Tom moves to Helsinki to join a VC fund, Maki, investing in tech startups throughout Europe. He falls in love with sauna culture and starts to volunteer at Helsinki’s famous Sompasauna.
Tom returns to the UK and decides to launch Lowlu and Sami joins the founding team. they spend time during the winter up in Bodø, where Sami lives, creating the design system.
Lowlu raises $1.2m to launch LowluOS, the all-in-one operating system that enables any business or individual to launch a sauna & cold plunge. It helps its first customer, a padel club, launch a beautiful outdoor spa experience.
