SaunaNews
The Sauna Industry's Record of Note
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Independent durability testing by Saunologia’s Lassi Liikkanen shows ceramic sauna stones lasting up to four times longer than natural alternatives. His data directly contradicts the ceramic-stone bans printed in heater manuals from Harvia and IKI.
Portal° Thermaculture started behind a Boulder brewery, burned down, reopened in Denver six weeks later, and built its first real brick-and-mortar in a former Minneapolis Jiffy Lube cooled by a chiller designed for penguin tanks. Five metros, no disclosed investors, and a founder who says people need “a dive bar that doesn’t serve alcohol.”
Alisa Cardenas runs Howl at the Moon Sauna Co. out of a converted 1989 horse trailer in West Michigan, and this November she is taking ten guests to a lakefront lodge in southern Iceland for six days of lagoons, wild bathing in Reykjadalur and Þórsmörk, the Icelandic sauna ritual called gúsa, and a mobile-saunagus session at the lodge. Meals, lodging, transport from Keflavík, and every bathing experience are included. Cardenas built Howl at the Moon around the Wildflower, a 1989 horse trailer converted into a mobile sauna with a Finnish-made Iki wood-burning stove and more than 350 pounds of sauna stones. Cedar Grove Sauna in Maine has been doing a related version of this from the other direction, bringing Lithuanian Bath Masters to Popham Beach for their first-ever North American training in 2023. It is the kind of trip more sauna operators with a community at home should be thinking about.