Recipient of the 1996 Seattle Mayor's
Small Business Award
The husband-and-wife team that helped make hot tubs synonymous with the Northwest good life is still going strong after nearly 20 years.
It was 1977 when Blair Osborn quit a professorship at the University of Washington and teamed with his wife, Alice Cunningham, who resigned as a job training administrator with the U.S. Department of Labor, to create the Olympic Hot Tub Company.
Neither had any experience in business, but they shared a common motivation: they felt burned out with their respective academic and government bureaucracies. Self-employment seemed the only escape.
Today Olympic Hot Tub sells over 700 hot tubs a year, with revenues of about $4 million. It is the world's number-one distributor for the Hot Spring thermal plastic spas created by Watkins Manufacturing Co. of Vista, California.
The firm started out producing its own line of cedar tubs. Osborn, in fact, created the first prototype himself.
Today Olympic is strictly a retailer with outlets in Seattle, Fife and Everett and plans for at least two more stores in the region, according to Cunningham, who this year shares a Mayor's Small Business Award with her husband Blair.
Olympic Hot Tub's owners are very active in both the charitable and community service fields. About 5 percent of after-tax profit goes to local charities such as the Arthritis Foundation, the Boys & Girls Club, and the Woodland Park Zoo, which received a $5,000 spa for its fundraising auction.
Reprinted with permission from the Puget Sound Business Journal
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