How Co-founders were sold a scam and turned it into a $25M brand

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How Co-founders were sold a scam and turned it into a $25M brand Yahoo Finance Video Updated Thu, May 28, 2026 at 5:00 AM CDT SHOP AMZN HRB Sun Home Saunas co-founders Tyler Fish and Adam Fisher explain how they transformed a disastrous initial business acquisition into a $25 million premium at-home wellness brand. I like sold my car and we our life savings into helping like buy this business and now we're stuck with this, and now all these sauna reviewers and experts are picking it up and saying, you know, this company are, you know, scam artists, beware, we're all over the internet, and so we're like, what the heck did we do? We're screwed before we even got started. Howdy y'all. I'm Elizabeth Gore. Welcome to the Big Idea from Yahoo Finance presented by Block Advisors, built by H&R Block. As a co-founder of the small business funding platform, Hello, Alice, it has always been my mission to help entrepreneurs have the tools they need to succeed. So let's cowboy up.Today's big idea question is, what does it take to build a premium wellness brand from the ground up? Our industry focus will be at-home wellness and recovery technology. Now, y'all cold plunges are transitioning from elite athlete recovery tools to everyday wellness products. All I can think of is Roy, um,And Coach Lasso and his giant trash tub. So I think things are changing since then. Residential adoption is accelerating as consumers build daily ritual wellness routines at home. The core sauna user demographic now is 30 to 65, and it's growing among young customers. So what is your wellness routine? Mine, um, I'm a big runner.I like to pray. I love time alone, but I tell you what, it's gonna take me a little bit more to get into these cold plunges. But joining me to talk about this today are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Sun Home Saunas, Tyler Fish and Adam Fisher. What started as a passion for heat and cold therapy has now grown into one of the fastest growing brands in at-home wellness, boasting almost 25 million in their first year.They have high performance recovery and longevity tools and use cutting edge design to go directly in people's homes. Today, we're diving into their journey as founders, how they built Sun Home from the ground up. They even threw them on their backs and loaded them into your own homes. It is a crazy, crazy story. And now they're standing out as one of the most competitive and fastest growing brands in wellness. So let's get to it.All right, Adam and Tyler, welcome to the Big Idea. I'm so glad to have y'all. I mean, do you two finish each other's sentences at this point? We talk that often pretty bad. You're literally doing you can actually can we can communicate without words too. It'spretty crazy. I picture you in your saunas with those old school, um, uh, phones that have the 10 can strings in between business planning and figuring things out.Now how'd y'all meet? We met at our first job outside of college. Um, we're both in tech sales.Um, selling software, so we were tag teaming deals and, um, kind of working together, learning about businesses, learning about the e-commerce world and digital marketing, um, we became fast friends and, um, the rest is history. Right on, andI need to know who made the first phone call to who on, hey, I have this insane idea, or was it a mind meld together. Well, this was one of many insane ideas that we've had together, and we always knew that we wanted to found a company together and really marry like our, our, our passions and talents for e-commerce, which is what we did for 10 years at our last job.Uh, and then our own personal interests, um, and so we had some really funny small businesses slash, I'll call them a hobby because it's not a business until you make or lose money and we can't do. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I love that till you make or lose money. That is so true. I love that. Uh, our first business was, was bike accessoriesnow.com andThat was, you can get this little mount to put on your, your bike handle or you can obviously mount your phone to it, and we thought it was like the coolest thing ever, and so we set up a little Shopify store and we like drop shipped it from China, we set up an automation where we'd serve like ads on Google. Someone would find our site they'd purchase, and then we'd automatically send the order to a drop shipper in China, and then they would snail mail it to the customer and so it would take like.3 weeks so we'd make like $3 on it and we, we had like 11 order and we're like right this isn't like sustainable or scalable so we're gonna call it quits, um, so we've done a few things. The funniest part about that story is the first order. I think we got it before we were even ready and we didn't even have the drop shipper set up, so we were like, we finally have a sale, we need to get this guy an order. We just bought it on Amazon and sent it to him. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we just Amazon and just.20/20 hindsight, we shouldn't have named it bike accessories now. It needed to be bike accessories, wait, wait just a minute. Well, interestingly though, your entire model now with home sauna is, is direct to consumer. I mean, it's, it's incredible what you built. Tell me about the model itself. Yeah, well, historically and previous to Sunhome, the most common method to purchase a sauna.Um, was really you, you had to call like a sales line or submit a lead and go through this rigorous, tedious process. Um, there was no really easy e-commerce environment to someone to that to really easily view the sauna and multiple, um, angles, look at the specs, um, look at a 3D rendering in your room, and then just be able to click purchase and have it show up on your door. And so we really wanted to remove that.friction because the space was still in the 90s dominated by just a few players that haven't really innovated and so our thought was, what if we could introduce, um, you know, a better designed, you know, better performance product, but remove that friction and bring a more modern experience to somewhat of an antiquated, you know, buying journey. And so now, obviously like the space is flooded with various Shopify stores and e-commerce providers for saunas, but back then it wasIt was, it was somewhat new, so we wanted to make it as easy as possible for someone to find a great sauna and have it showup at their doorstep quickly. And contrary to bike accessories now, or I guess bike accessories later, whatever you wanna call it, we, uh, we pride ourselves in, um, good lead times and actually having uh our products inventoried and warehoused, um, in multiple locations across the US because in today's world, as you know, with Amazon and everything else, people expect their products to be there yesterday.It's not the same for sauna, right? These are 1000, over 1000 pounds. Some of them, they come on pallets, they need special trucks. Um, it is, you know, a journey to get this to your door, but we take all of that responsibility and all of that cost and offer free shipping to all of our customers nationwide, um, and.Work every day to make sure that we're as in stock as possible and have the best lead times possible. Well, and also what a, what an awesome way to get to know your customers, right, to be the ones staying engaged with them through that whole process. Yeah, exactly, and Tyler and I were originally the ones.Customer facing sales and service, you called, it was, it was Adam and Tyler. Thank God it was like that movie where, you know, someone like someone's, you know, sink broke and the plumber came out and they called to have their, their lawn mowed, and then the lawnmower was the same guy that fixed the sink. Like that was us for like the first like 3 I love it. I, I picture y'all like those little cartoons where you have the piano strapped to your back trying to get it up the stairs, right, except for the sauna. It honestly felt like a cartoon, but back then those conversations were kind of what fueled our growth because we could hear from the customer firsthand, um, from sales, you know, what are they seeing in the industry, what are they lacking, where, what products do we need to innovate and provide them, Service, um, what's most important to them if something breaks.How quickly do they need their parts, should that happen. Um, so, Tyler and I hearing that firsthand, we were able to, you know, fuel our product, um, roadmap and innovation roadmap, as well as our whole business model around what do the customers want and need. Well, and having your hands in every part of the business means that you really learn every part of the business, right? I think that's the benefit of having to get your hands dirty because you're not like a company that starts and you and you hire from day one, you know, you hire someone for finance, for marketing, for sales, for CES. We did it ourselves, and so now when we have calls with our department leaders, right, we can get into like really in-depth.Strategic conversations because we know more about the individual, you know, department of business. Well, and you're your own best user. You just showed me right behind you is cold plunge right outside your window. So that, that makes me feel even better about your product. Hey, first of all, congrats on In 5000. Um, 25 million in your 1st, 1st months in business is not a, not a bad gig, right? Yeah, and we, and we, we had no idea that we were gonna get named number 20th on the Inc 5000 list. That was quite a surprise. We're like, oh, you know what, if we make top 1000, that would be huge. We'll have to bring the whole family out. And then we started doing all these interviews and I got outreach from Inc. and we're like, all right, maybe it's a little bit higher than 1000, and, and then we got the word we're like, holy crap. So this.It wasn't as big as a rocket ship, or it was bigger than a than of a rocket ship than we actually thought it was, it was a pretty wild experience. Why, why health and wellness? I mean, what y'all, y'all were at impact, um, and then a couple of things in between. What, what made you pick this industry specifically? Yeah, there's a, there's a fun story and then like a technical story, um.That that the fun, well, I mean, the truth is like Adam and I, we knew we wanted to launch an e-commerce business, um, because we spoke to e-commerce innovators and leaders ofThe coolest brands doing, you know, the best things like Uber, uh, at the time, Airbnb, Instacart, Target, Williams-Sonoma, um, DoorDash, like you'd name it, we were talking to like the head of digital marketing for years, and so we knew a lot more than the average person that just wanted to start, you know, a Shopify store, uh, and then Adam and I are big wellness junkies, right? Um.We really got to know each other from going to the gym every day at lunch. Um, we really care about what we eat, what goes in our body, and exercising, um, you know, we think movement is one of the most important things in life, and so we really wanted to marry those, those two passions together, right, for, for digital and, and fitness, um, and bridge that gap with saunas, and we thought saunas, this is getting more on the technical side of things, was a really great fit because, um, they're, they're high AOV, meaning high order value.Um, so you don't have to, our theory was, well, you don't have to sell a lot of volume, right, to make a lot of revenue, and then if the product's great, there's gonna be a, you know, not a lot of returns, not a lot of headaches you're gonna have to deal with, um, in this whole wellness space in general is kind of, kind of starting to boom, and we thought it was just like a really interesting category, and then we ended up finding this little site that was for sale that was selling saunas already.Um, through a different company, um, and so we hit them up, and that is a really crazy story that we can walk you through, but long story short is we acquired that website, rebranded, got a new dealer agreement, and we started Sunhome by actually selling another manufacturer's products.Um, because we didn't have to front load any payments for inventory, cause it was on a drop ship model. They were a proven leader at the time in the space, and so, you know, we didn't have to worry about, you know, uh, you know, basically selling for quality products, um, and then, you know, we can spend the small working capital we did save on marketing and growing the store versus inventory and and design.So that was our strategy and that's really why we got in the silence. Brilliant. I gotta jump back to, um, I love businesses that, uh, launch either in partnership or they pull in an existing entity. Um, was that a risk, or, or were you all like, yeah, this is the way to do it when you purchase the other company? Well, we thought.We thought it was gonna be like a walk in the park. There's a company that already has their proven business model. They're selling saunas, or so we thought, um, and the web, the website was built. The marketing agency partnerships were cultivated. We thought, OK, we, we pay 300, um, and we have this website, and now we can launch our, you know, our first real business. Um, turns out.It is the opposite of a walk in the park. Uh, it's, it's like a walk through Jurassic Park. It was, it was a park, but just the wrong one, the wrong one, yeah, and it turned out, you know, in the long, in the long run, um.There was debt that we took on. There were angry customers we didn't know about. There was a dealer agreement that wasn't actually valid upon, uh, exchange of assets. So we basically bought, actually, I'm quite quick, a few of these stories. So we, we, we bought this company and you know, Adam and I obviously don't know what we're doing, so we didn't do our due diligence properly, and we come to find out that after the assets were transferred and the money was sent.We got people calling in saying, hey, you know, we put our deposit down a few weeks ago. Where's our sauna? We have no record of any of these customers that bought from this website, and it was more and more calls. Turns out the guy who sold it to us, um, he took everyone's money.Sold the business, didn't submit the orders of the manufacturer, and then leftit on us.And we're here with like, I like sold my car and we put our life savings into helping like buy this business, and now we're stuck with this, and now all these sawno viewers and experts are picking it up and saying, you know, this company are, you know, scam artists, beware, we're all over the internet.And so we're like, what the heck did we do? We're screwed before we even got started. And so we, uh, we had to completely rebrand, change the website, change the company name, and, and, and start from scratch. And then we also figured out that the dealer agreement, which means the agreement between us and the manufacturer who makes the saunas, is non-transferable, meaning if he sold us the business, we can't, they can't transfer the agreement to us, and so it was dead upon arrival.But the crazy part is we were in Mexico with my mom, is me, Adam, and my mom, and she's like, wait, my boyfriend golfs with the CEO of the Canadian division, let me call him.And so she called him, he pulled some strings and got us a fresh dealer agreement.Um, from scratch, even though they weren't allowing the dealer, so we could go back to that original, the guy who sold us the business because we didn't transfer the assets or funds yet and say you have to give us a better deal because no one is gonna buy your business because you can't transfer that dealer agreement, so we use that negotiation lever to get a far, you know, lesser.Price even now he's it was, it was such a rollercoaster for we even got us for the record, that, uh, Tyler's mom's connection, which was crazy coincidence that got us a meeting that didn't get us the dealer agreement. There were still a lot of hoops and I itwas not, they were not trying to take on any new dealers, um.Not only that, they were on the way of getting rid of all their dealers, and so we were, we were, it was an uphill battle from the beginning, and then.Um, I think it was 1.5 to 2 years later, they finally told us, all right, you have 30 days, you can't sell our saunas anymore. It might have even been less than 30 days. I think it waslike, I think it was like 10 days, and we were doing like millions of dollars of revenue, and they're like in 10 days you have to take all of the products off your website, and we were like, or we're gonna collapse. We have like nothing to sell at that point, and so we had to scramble.And find another alternative which we luckily did and got got lucky there. But you know, I always find all y'all's headlines say, you know, Sonic Company 25 million in year one, you know this, these are the stories that I'm just glad other business owners hear them because it's always hard, you know, it's always, even when you think it's gonna be easy, by the way, super random.Our family, we got a, a new phone a couple of years back, and it was a former taxidermist who took all these people's animals to stuff and then he ran away with both the animals and the money. So we kept getting all these phone calls are very angry, either hunter.Or people whose pet they were doing whatever with. So, uh, that was my weird I know it was so bizarre, but I can't imagine y'all as founders building this great company and suddenly all this anger. Um, I have one question. How did you convince, uh, the Canadian folks to help you because you said it wasn't a yes write-off to basically bet on y'all and give you that contract. That was a good, that's a good question. That's kind of where I think our history and sales, uh, came into play. And so, yes, Tyler's mom got us the meeting, but then, you know, we had to convince the COO of this company who was already figuring out his plan to remove all their dealers that they could take on one more, um, so I think it really just, it came to the our, our, our, ourstrategy was also besides like having the sales chop was.Our pitch was, we're going to sell your saunas to a new demographic profile that you're not already sending to, so we're gonna bring incremental value and new customers to the table that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten, because in their eyes they thought these dealers are just cannibalizing their existing sales sales. So we're like, we're gonna bring a whole another avenue. And then that that that is actually very true with Sunholm, which is different from the other dealers because the other dealers were leveraging traditional marketing channels, I guess not traditional, you know, traditional in the last 5 to 10 to 20 years like Google Ads and um metamarketing, we were leveraging new channels, influencer partnerships, celebrity endorsements, um.And cultivating relationships with prominent figures in the space and so that's really um why we were different and why we were able to reach these new audiences. We also um started selling, you know, this was a little bit later, but we started selling black uh saunas so we changed the whole look and.Um, you know, what's been traditional kind of these wooden looking saunas that get stuffed in the basement. Now we made the saunas a centerpiece of this new, um, maybe, um, more like hip or, uh, more, um, you know, I would say just like a new demographic that we're now reaching. Also the whole wellness buzz was at the same time, saunas and infrared saunas started to become very trendy on social and on, um, TV.So the, it was kind of this, this big storm of.You know, what was happening in the world, but also, um, us kind of finding that niche and figuring out how to target those audiences.

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The news details how Sun Home Saunas co-founders transformed a fraudulent business acquisition into a $25 million premium at-home wellness brand. This success story highlights the growing market potential and consumer demand for at-home wellness and recovery technology.

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