Inside Harvia's Five-Factory Global Manufacturing Network

Most sauna brands run one factory. A few European premium players run two. Harvia runs five, across four continents, each specialized for a different product category or regional market. The footprint is how a single company can serve Finnish household saunas, American barrel sauna buyers, German spa projects, and Japanese commercial installs out of different plants, all with meaningful local content. It is also the reason Harvia has been less exposed than any competitor to every major supply chain shock of the last five years, from COVID to Russia to Red Sea freight disruption. (See every Harvia news story, earnings release, and M&A event in our Harvia News hub.)

Muurame, Finland: The World's Largest Sauna Heater Factory

The Muurame facility is Harvia's headquarters and the spiritual center of the company. The plant produces more than 150,000 heaters per year, a figure Harvia management disclosed at its Capital Markets Day 2024. No other sauna heater manufacturer in the world approaches this scale. For context, competitors like Narvi (Finland), IKI (Finland), Kastor (Finland), and Tylo-Helo (Sweden-Finland) run much smaller dedicated production lines, typically in the tens of thousands of units per year combined, not per individual facility.

Muurame is the primary production site for Harvia's flagship electric heater lines: the Cilindro pillar heater, the Virta Pro commercial series, the Legend wood-burning stoves, and volume models like Vega and Forte. The plant also produces sauna components (heater stones, control units prior to the sentiotec integration, and heater enclosures) and serves as the central logistics hub for Harvia Group purchasing in Europe.

In 2023, Harvia invested in new automated production cells and industrial production robots in Muurame, adding capacity without adding headcount. The company also moved wood-burning heater manufacturing fully to Muurame from subcontractors during 2023 after its exit from Russia in 2022 (Russian subcontractors had previously handled part of this workload). Aluminum stove production for Scandinavian hot tubs was also reshored from Estonia to Muurame in 2023 for quality control reasons.

Lewisburg, West Virginia: North America's Sauna Room Engine

Harvia's Lewisburg plant, operating under the Almost Heaven Saunas brand acquired in December 2018, produces more than 10,000 saunas per year and is Harvia's largest sauna room factory globally. It serves almost exclusively North America and is the operational backbone of the region that has grown from EUR 3 million (2018) to EUR 43.4 million (2023) to an annualized run rate near EUR 70 million by 2025.

The plant handles volume manufacturing of outdoor and indoor sauna rooms, including barrel saunas (Almost Heaven's signature product since 1977), cabin saunas, and the hybrid traditional-plus-infrared saunas launched in 2023. In Q1 2024, Harvia purchased 8.7 hectares (approximately 21.5 acres) of additional land around the facility, signaling capacity expansion in the two-year horizon. At Q3 2025 results, Harvia confirmed ongoing investments to expand Lewisburg, including building layout improvements and new machinery for higher throughput.

An automated painting line installed in recent years was flagged at Harvia's Capital Markets Day 2024 as a key productivity driver, along with general factory automation. The plant employs approximately 76 people as of year-end 2023 and is the only sauna room factory of its size in North America, giving Harvia a "Made in USA" competitive advantage it has explicitly leaned into for federal procurement and tariff-exposed commercial projects.

Gheorgheni, Romania: Europe's Sauna Room Factory

The Gheorgheni plant in Transylvania handles sauna room production for the European market, including volume barrel and cabin saunas distributed under the Harvia brand, sentiotec (for the Central European premium infrared segment), and supplying Harvia's Nordic and Continental European dealer networks. Romania offers Harvia a lower labor cost base within the EU, avoiding any customs complications that production outside the EU would create for the Continental European customer base. The plant is part of Harvia's 116-employee Other European Countries production footprint as of year-end 2023.

Guangzhou, China: Volume Heaters and Components

Harvia runs a heater and component factory in Guangzhou, China that specializes in volume heaters and components serving Asia-Pacific and Group-wide purchasing. The plant supplies heater components that feed into Harvia's other factories and produces finished heaters for the Chinese, Japanese, and broader APAC markets. Alongside it sits a Hong Kong sales and trading entity. The China footprint has been key to Harvia's pricing competitiveness in the APAC region, where sauna is an emerging market with diverse specifications (notably Japan, which requires Harvia to manufacture heaters specifically to Japanese electrical standards through this facility).

Driedorf, Germany: EOS Premium Manufacturing

The Driedorf facility is where the EOS Group, acquired by Harvia in 2020, manufactures its full premium product portfolio. EOS, founded in 1944, is the number-one premium sauna heater producer globally and holds an estimated 60% share of the premium segment in Germany alone. The Driedorf line produces EOS-branded sauna heaters (including the premium S-line, "underbench" and "behindbench" hidden installations, and the design-forward Structure heater launched in 2023), Kusatek gas-fired sauna heaters (EOS is the only relevant gas-fired premium sauna heater producer in the world), Spatronic electronic control units, steam generators, and infrared hardware. All EOS products are developed and manufactured in Driedorf with the "Made in Germany" positioning intact.

In Q3 2025, Harvia disclosed it was investing in a state-of-the-art, energy-efficient coating system in Driedorf, part of a broader capital deployment to modernize the EOS line. The facility employs approximately 116 people as of year-end 2023 and is the technology center for Harvia Group in control electronics through the Spatronic integration.

Round Rock, Texas: ThermaSol Assembly (Added July 2024)

After closing the USD 30.4 million ThermaSol acquisition on 31 July 2024, Harvia added a sixth production facility to its network: ThermaSol's design and assembly operation in Round Rock, Texas, near Austin. ThermaSol manufactures steam generators, smart-shower controls, the ThermaTouch control platform, and related steam-room hardware for the North American residential steam market. The Texas location is strategic: it adds a second US manufacturing footprint after West Virginia, diversifies geographic risk, and positions Harvia with hubs in both the Southeastern United States (Lewisburg) and the Texas-Central corridor (Round Rock). ThermaSol employs approximately 40 people.

Italy, Estonia, Austria: Specialized Component Sites

Alongside its five core factories, Harvia operates smaller specialized sites. The September 2023 acquisition of Phoenix El-Mec, an electromechanical timer switch maker in Belluno, Italy, added vertical integration for a critical heater component. Kirami, acquired in 2021, continues to manufacture Scandinavian wood-fired hot tubs in Sastamala, Finland and partly in Estonia through Metagroupp OU. Sentiotec production partially sits in Wolfurt, Austria. These smaller sites are not standalone product factories at Harvia Group scale but are essential to the supply chain.

Logistics: Agile, Multi-Site, Partner Networks

Head of Operations Mika Suoja described Harvia's logistics at Capital Markets Day 2024 as "agile transport network" backed by own logistics centers in Europe, the United States, and Asia. Road, sea, and air transport are coordinated through a tight partner network that Harvia credits with enabling it to navigate COVID disruptions, the Russia exit, and Red Sea freight problems without meaningful customer service level deterioration. Harvia's sales and operations planning (S&OP) process centralizes demand forecasting with daily order intake analysis and comparisons against consumer indexes to pre-position inventory.

Two thirds of Harvia Group's personnel are blue-collar workers, according to CMD disclosures. Average annual productivity improvements have exceeded 5% per year over the three years ending 2024, and automated production cells have enabled over 25% capacity expansions without proportional headcount increases.

Strategic Implications

The multi-factory structure gives Harvia four competitive advantages its single-factory rivals do not have.

Tariff insulation. Harvia can route production for any major market into a local or friendly-tariff facility. US-sold saunas can be assembled in West Virginia or Texas. European saunas can come from Romania or Germany. Japanese heaters can be specified at Guangzhou. Competitors shipping everything out of a single country face much higher tariff exposure. (See our analysis of sauna brand tariff exposure.)

Labor and cost flexibility. Production can flex between Finland, Romania, and China based on labor cost, available skills, and lead-time requirements. Volume components come from Guangzhou; premium controls come from Driedorf. This is not theoretical; it is operational.

Risk management. When Harvia exited Russia in 2022 (where it had EUR 7.5 million of 2022 revenue, falling to zero by 2023), the company had the capacity in Finland, Romania, and Germany to absorb displaced demand and subcontractor workloads. A single-factory competitor facing a similar market exit would face potentially catastrophic capacity loss.

Acquisition integration muscle. Harvia has integrated five acquisitions over six years (Almost Heaven 2018, EOS 2020, Kirami 2021, Phoenix El-Mec 2023, ThermaSol 2024) while maintaining operating margins above 19%. That track record would be impossible without a modular factory network that can absorb new production lines without disruption.

Harvia's five-factory (now six-factory with ThermaSol) network is the physical infrastructure behind its stated ambition to consolidate the fragmented global sauna market. No other sauna company has the scale, geographic distribution, or specialization mix. The 150,000 heaters per year Muurame output alone exceeds every competitor's total heater production combined. For investors, tariff watchers, and buyers trying to understand why Harvia can absorb shocks that break smaller rivals, the answer is the plant network. It is the single biggest strategic moat in the business.