SaunaShare, Inc. Buys SaunaNews.com and Plans to Grow the Sauna Trade’s Newsroom

SaunaShare, Inc., the company behind SaunaShare.com and SaunaMarketplace.com, announced today that it has bought SaunaNews.com. SaunaNews keeps its name, its archive of more than 150 stories, its worldwide calendar of sauna events and its company pages. What readers will notice is a line under every byline that says who owns the site, and what that means for its coverage.

“I was relying on SaunaNews as a way to stay up to date on the companies and news shaping the industry,” said Ben Burger, a co-founder of SaunaShare, Inc. “It’s important for the industry, and we’re excited to grow it.”

A newsroom the trade didn’t have

SaunaNews exists because of a gap. Sauna had wellness blogs, brand newsletters, and pool-and-spa trade magazines that cover it as one category among many. It had no trade press of its own in English: nothing that followed the heater makers, the bathhouse openings, the building codes and the tariffs week to week, with names, numbers and sources.

The people inside the business feel that gap too. “Bathhouses are opening at a remarkable pace, yet there is still very little reliable data available about the business and operational models behind them,” Cassandra Cavanah, vice chair of the Global Wellness Institute’s Hydrothermal Initiative, said in August, when she and Lisa Starr launched a bathhouse benchmarking survey through two of the institute’s initiatives.

SaunaNews was built for the people whose next decision depends on that kind of information: bathhouse and hotel spa operators; the makers of heaters, cabins, controls and sauna wood; installers, architects and code officials; and the investors following the category. It reports what launched, what opened, who bought whom, what a standard changed, and what the research found.

Nearly six months, more than 150 stories

SaunaNews published its first stories in April 2026. By the end of that month it had a hub for Harvia’s results, filings and investor calendar, and a worldwide calendar of sauna events, from Aufguss competitions to trade shows. Company profiles, with each fact linked to its source, arrived in July, along with a Finnish-language section of translated stories and sauna jobs in Finland.

The coverage has followed the business where it happens. SaunaNews explained why the new UL sauna heater standard arrived before the building codes were ready for it, reported Saunum’s research partnership with Tallinn University, and traced how a Canadian sauna kit and its cedar cladding land on opposite sides of a 50% tariff list. In September it covered the launch of a charter for public saunas as the International Sauna Congress opened in Oslo.

Readers have followed. A search for “sauna news” puts SaunaNews first on Google and Bing this week, and AI assistants including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini now send readers to its stories. Page views grew 19% from July to August, and an average of 15% a month from May through August. Newsletter subscribers have grown an average of 48% a month since May, including 51% so far in September.

Who bought it

SaunaShare, Inc. began with SaunaShare.com, a platform for renting mobile saunas. When public and rental saunas closed during COVID, the company launched Sauna Marketplace to help the sauna operators it worked with. Today it runs a family of sites, each with one job, and SaunaNews is now one of them.

SaunaShare.com is a free directory of saunas and the stays built around them. Nobody pays to be listed, and it never takes a cut of a session or a stay. SaunaMarketplace.com sells saunas, heaters and thermally modified wood, with help sizing the heater to the room. SaunaDesignPro is a free planner for laying out a sauna room in 3D before anything is built. SaunaNews reports the news, and SaunaShare’s calendar of public sauna events runs on SaunaNews’s event listings.

Sauna Marketplace is run by its two founders, Burger and Ben Frizzell, who spent most of their working lives managing concerts, events and tours before sauna. Both run saunas at home, and the store has helped customers put saunas in nearly every state.

They also go to the source. In late August and early September, Burger and Frizzell spent two weeks in Finland and Estonia. They visited HUUM and Haljas in Tartu and Leil in Tartu County, toured Thermory’s Reola and Loo plants and Auroom’s factory in Vana-Kastre during Thermory’s partner summit in Tallinn, and walked through Saunum’s cabin factory and heater plant in and around Tallinn. The photos in this story come from that trip.

The business SaunaNews covers

The Global Wellness Institute puts the global wellness economy at $6.8 trillion in 2024, up 7.9% in a year, and expects 7.6% annual growth to nearly $9.8 trillion by 2029. The United States is the largest single market, at $2.1 trillion. Two of the fastest-growing pieces sit closest to the sauna: spas took in $157.4 billion in 2024, up 14.6%, and thermal and mineral springs $71.7 billion, up 11.1%, according to GWI’s 2025 Global Wellness Economy Monitor.

GWI doesn’t size saunas as a sector of their own, and its spa figure leaves out the saunas people buy for their homes. Its report is clear about where the energy is, though. “The new bathhouses are establishing themselves as wellness-oriented ‘third places’ where people can find connection and community,” it says, and their lower prices are “attracting a new, younger, and more diverse customer base to the wellness industry.”

The sauna market itself is smaller and easier to picture. Harvia, the Finnish sauna and heater maker listed on Nasdaq Helsinki, estimates it at close to EUR 4 billion, with 18 million saunas installed worldwide and, per its 2025 annual report, just over 1 million in North America. Harvia’s North American revenue rose 38.6% in the second quarter, and chief executive Matias Järnefelt said saunas there are “increasingly becoming a mainstream wellness product rather than a niche offering,” in the company’s half-year report.

The bathhouse survey’s early results, published September 23, give a first look at the operators’ side. Of 43 respondents, 65% expect to run more than one location within three years, 24 of the 34 with operating facilities report positive cash flow, and 35% put $5 million or more into opening. The authors call the findings directional: the sample is small and mostly North American.

Five changes we’re watching

This part is analysis: our read on where the business is going, drawn from what SaunaNews has reported this year.

The sauna is becoming a night out

Social sauna is moving from the spa to the city block. Bathhouse, which runs three locations in New York, raised $35 million in a round led by Imaginary Ventures and says it plans 10 locations nationwide. Its first outside New York, a roughly 36,000-square-foot site in Philadelphia’s Bellevue building, was scheduled to open September 25. Portal Thermaculture opened its fourth club in 14 months. Therme Group hired a Chief Entertainment Officer from the attractions business, which says sauna is an entertainment business now about as plainly as a job title can. In the bathhouse survey, 77% of respondents offer or plan guided sauna sessions, and 65% run or plan large-format or event saunas. At SCHWET’s new banya in Tribeca, the lounge is built as the main event.

Public sauna wants to be infrastructure

The British Sauna Society counts more than 600 public saunas in the UK. Finland has 3.3 million saunas for 5.5 million people, according to UNESCO. Nobody we could find keeps a count of public saunas in the United States, but the direction is plain. Idaho put a sauna concession in a state park out to bid this spring, and in Oslo in September, Sauna for All’s charter asked cities and investors to treat public sauna as social infrastructure. Expect to see that phrase in more city budgets and park proposals.

The rulebook is catching up

The US got a modern sauna heater safety standard when Underwriters Laboratories published UL 60335-2-53 in June 2025, but the model building codes that inspectors enforce have been slower to follow. Europe approved its first common standard for public sauna rooms, EN 18164, in January. Cold plunges are headed into the same fight, state by state. For operators and installers, the next few years bring more paperwork before the first ladle of water hits the stones, not less.

The supply chain sets the price

What a sauna costs in the US gets decided a long way from the showroom. Lumber, steel and freight have been squeezing US sauna makers and importers from three sides this year. A tariff classification can split a single kit in two, and many of the European factories that supply North American dealers still shut for weeks each summer. SaunaNews will keep tracking the rules and the calendars that decide when a sauna arrives and what it costs.

Proof is becoming part of the product

Harvia expects the global sauna market to grow faster than its historical 5% a year over the next five years, “fueled by the increasing awareness of sauna and its health benefits.” That puts a premium on evidence. Saunum wants outside evidence of what its evener heat does to the people sitting in it, not only to the air. A 588-person Swedish study found that women and men report different benefits from the same sauna. The companies that pay for real studies will be the ones that can back up a health claim, and SaunaNews will keep reporting what the studies found, and what they didn’t.

What changes at SaunaNews, and what doesn’t

Every story now says who owns SaunaNews, right under the byline, including the part that matters most: SaunaShare, Inc. sells many of the products SaunaNews writes about, through SaunaMarketplace.com, and readers should assume that experience shapes what we cover and what we don’t. We aren’t neutral, and we won’t pretend to be.

That experience is also where most of what we know comes from. Sizing heaters to real rooms, sorting out freight, and hearing from owners years after the install teach things a press release never will.

The standards stay the same. Stories start with what changed and who did it. Figures, quotes and research findings carry their source, linked where a public link exists, and a company’s claims are reported as that company’s claims. Temperatures are in °F and sizes in feet and inches. Paid placements are labeled Sponsor. When we get something wrong, we fix it and say what changed. In September, every story in the archive was checked again against its sources, and the ones that were corrected carry a dated note.

The site also has a new design and a new tagline: Better sauna, clearly reported.