Sauna House Is Franchising the Nordic Bathhouse. The Numbers Back It Up.

Most wellness concepts that try to scale from Asheville to Austin end up diluted. Sauna House may be the exception. Founded by Andrew Lachlan, the North Carolina-based communal bathhouse brand posted 276% two-year revenue growth, landed at #838 on the 2024 Inc. 5000, and has quietly assembled one of the more credible franchise machines in thermal wellness, including an affiliated company that supplies every franchisee’s saunas. Sauna House dates its founding to 2019; its 2024 franchise disclosure document says an affiliate had run the original Asheville bathhouse since February 2018.

This is not a spa brand slapping “sauna” on a menu. Sauna House is building real infrastructure around a specific and repeatable concept. The question is whether the infrastructure holds as they push beyond the Carolinas.

The origin

Lachlan built Sauna House out of personal necessity. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, he took on a 30-day cold water challenge from a friend who used cold water to manage chronic pain, then paired it with a run-down sauna in his apartment building, he has written. The experience changed how he thought about wellness: not as a service delivered to an individual in a private room, but as something practiced communally, the way Scandinavians have done it for centuries.

The concept Lachlan brought to Asheville is called the Hot-Cold-Relax cycle, a two-hour communal session rotating between traditional sauna, cold plunge, and rest. Phones are banned inside the bathhouse. That is not incidental. The digital detox rule is central to the brand’s identity, a hard stop meant to force a psychological reset. In a market crowded with amenity-first wellness brands, “no phones” is a genuine differentiator. It takes nerve to enforce.

We are thrilled that the hard work and dedication of our team have been recognized. More importantly, we believe that with growth comes the opportunity to give back to causes we are passionate about in significant ways. (Andrew Lachlan, CEO, Sauna House)

A business built for volume

The Sauna House model layers several revenue streams on top of the base session. Two-hour thermal cycle passes are the primary driver. Monthly memberships convert that session demand into recurring revenue. Private Hot-Cold-Relax suites command a premium for guests who want the experience without the communal element. Deep tissue massage, bundled with bathhouse access, rounds out a higher-margin add-on channel. Retail and e-commerce add another stream: the brand sells apparel and bathing supplies, and its online shop has carried home sauna equipment including Auroom modular saunas and HUUM electric heaters from Estonia.

The economics work in part because of labor efficiency. A communal sauna session requires far less staff per guest-hour than a treatment-room spa. Once the facilities are built and the water is chilled, the marginal cost of adding one more body to the sauna is close to zero. High fixed costs, low variable costs, recurring membership revenue: that is a business model that rewards scale.

The franchise stack

Sauna House said in February 2024 that it sold ten franchise locations in 2023 and hoped to add ten more by the end of that year. The initial franchise fee is $49,500. Total investment to open a location runs about $1.55 million to $3.83 million, a wide spread driven mostly by build-out, which the 2024 disclosure document puts at $650,000 to about $2.14 million. The bathhouses are infrastructure-heavy: the Durham location covers 6,993 square feet, and installing its cold pools in the 1940s building meant pouring new concrete and steel footings. Ongoing royalty is 7% of gross sales, per the franchise disclosure document Sauna House filed in Minnesota in 2025.

One thing that separates Sauna House from most wellness franchisors is that it controls the sauna supply for the network, a move that echoes the broader industry shift toward factory-built modular saunas for commercial spaces. Its franchise page lists a “Custom Sauna Factory” among its selling points. The disclosure document names an affiliate, Bathing Goodies, as the exclusive supplier of franchisees’ traditional saunas (including wood and lighting), sauna heaters, and heated furniture, and says the affiliates buy those goods from third parties and resell them. That is a deliberate supply chain decision that gives the brand control over the equipment in every franchised bathhouse.

Between sauna sets, guests rest on heated seating from Galanter & Jones. Locker rooms use soaps from Dr. Bronner’s and Everyone (EO Products), both B Corps. Facilities use no single-use plastics, compost cups, lids, and tea, and skip paper towels and electric hand dryers, steps Sauna House pitches against the energy and water consumption that a commercial bathhouse inevitably produces.

The cold plunge hardware

Sauna House does not use pod-style personal cold plunge units. Its communal cold plunges are in-ground stainless steel pools 4.5 feet deep with continuously circulating water, and Durham has two custom-built plunges that each hold 15 people. That distinction matters both for the guest experience and for the regulatory reality: Sauna House says its plunges must meet North Carolina’s rules for public bathing facilities, including permits, inspections, continuous disinfection, and daily records. It is a harder operational lift than an infrared studio with a single-person cold tub, and it creates a genuine barrier to entry for anyone trying to replicate the concept cheaply.

Where they are building

The corporate footprint anchors in the Carolinas. The original Asheville location, on Short Coxe Avenue, was the flagship; it closed in July 2026, and Sauna House says it intends to return to Asheville in a new location. Durham, Charlotte, and Raleigh are open in North Carolina, as are bathhouses in Greenville, South Carolina, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Bonita Springs, Florida.

In Austin, the company opened an interim concept in North Austin in November 2025 called the Sauna Garden, an indoor-outdoor experience built around wood-burning saunas, while the local ownership team builds a permanent bathhouse on the adjacent property. Summerville, South Carolina, is also in the immediate pipeline.

The competitive context

Sauna House is not the biggest social thermal wellness brand in America. Bathhouse in New York, which had two locations at the time, told CNBC in March that it expects about $120 million in run-rate revenue by the end of 2026. Othership raised about $8.5 million in 2025 to fund its US expansion. SweatHouz had more than 78 studios open in 25 states in December 2025, according to Athletech News. QC Terme is bringing European thermal spa hospitality to the US market.

But Sauna House is arguably building the most replicable version of the concept, the one most likely to reach mid-sized American cities that will never see a Bathhouse or an Othership. Meanwhile, scrappier independents like White Mountain Sauna Haus in North Conway, NH are proving that the communal sauna model works even without a franchise system, just a renovated barn and a walk-in policy. The communal format, the controlled sauna supply chain, the documented franchise economics, the digital detox rule, the Inc. 5000 placement: there is a real business here. The question is whether they can execute the build-out at speed without diluting what makes the Asheville original work in the first place. Expansion is always where the founders’ vision meets the operator’s limitations. For Sauna House, that test is just getting started.