Founders Story

When sitting down to write this, Sam Tirtawidjaja (the brains behind this website) wrote the following intro for me to get started:

“icebaths.comm was founded in Bali in 2021 with a clear goal: to create cold plunges that look better than any other on the market, last longer, and maintain unmatched efficiency over time.”

Now, I could write an “on-brand article” to fit in with Sam’s meticulous attention to detail about and talk about how I set out from the very beginning with those exact intentions. But it would make for a very untruthful story.

Truth be told, I am not an engineer, speak very little Indonesian and I do not even like ice baths. Although the last one was a joke, but I do often wake up and think: “how did I end up here”, so this is an honest account of how we, as a company, arrived to where we are.

I came to Bali in March 2020, two days before the airport closed for Covid. I left England at 26 and had been working in in Asia ever since., but was my first visit to Bali and after 6 months it felt like home.

Bali is a special place and in my opinion its the people that make it. Both the locals who have an amazing welcoming kind hearted nature and culture and the expats that decide to call it home. It also sits at the forefront of wellness culture globally, with few exceptions. Cold immersion, breathwork, fitness are not just trends, they are a genuine part of daily life for a large part of the community.

I’ve felt the best I ever have coming to Bali, and icebaths have been a big part of that after trying one for the first time at Body Factory Gym in Canggu.

Building my first Icebath

I decided to built an icebath myself, after extensivley looking for suppliers in Bali that could build me a portable one and also discovering the only real supplier on the market at the time was based in the US and it was going to take 2 months and cost upwards of $20k to buy, ship, import and install one. My goal was just to make a copy of the one I was going to buy, faster and cheaper with the least amount of pain possible.

After researching what went into building a chilling unit, I decided to buy a cheap one from China (mistake) and paid a freelancer to design me an icebath. After a day driving around Bali asking local business if they could build me a fiberglass bath. I met Toktok, a man with a shed attached to his house that was confident he could build my design. After 10+ trips to toktok’s, taking the chiller apart and hiring an AC technician after 6 weeks I had what I believe still to be Bali’s first portable icebath.

Icebaths

Going All In

On January 1st 2023, I made the decision to stop treating icebaths as side project and go all in. Committing real money to a name felt like committing to the company. And the company needed a name, and I couldn’t think of a better one.

I also made the decision to completely stop making our ugly fiberglass icebath and instead lean into the design more, to try and make something looked great and people were proud of having in their home. Bali and Indonesia in general has a deep tradition of working with teak, I went back to the drawing board looking at designs and

That same month, we made the most important product decision in the company’s history. We stopped building with fibreglass and switched to teak.

The reasoning was simple. Fibreglass worked, but nobody was proud to have it in their home. It looked like gym equipment. If we were going to ask people to put one of our ice baths on their terrace, beside their pool, in their villa, it had to be something they actually wanted to look at. Something they were proud to own.

Bali has a deep tradition of teak craftsmanship. Generations of woodworkers. Century-old sustainably sourced timber. The skill was already here, on the island, waiting to be applied to something new. I started the whole process from scratch.