- [Narrator] Production funding for making it up North is provided by the citizens of Minnesota, through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

(hissing sound) (background upbeat music) - When English language picked up Sauna, as the one Finnish word that made it in the English dialect and that's sort of how we know the lands through it here and the why some people correct you on pronunciation.

And we never correct people, we just give them the great experience.

- Well, it's a real strong connection to my Finnish heritage, the Sauna, they are known to be the inventors of it.

And I grew up having only a Sauna for 13 years.

We didn't have a bathtub, we had a Sauna.

- [Justin] I love the fact that here in the North, there is more vocabulary around Sauna than anywhere else in the country from what I know.

- [Narrator] I love the Lampomassa, the intensity of getting those rocks, not just hot, but densely hot.

(hissing sound) - [Narrator] And that will make winter bearable.

- I mean, Sauna has just been my thing and I love it.

I love it for so many reasons and elements.

I wrote a book on how to build a Sauna and one of my passions is to share that and I take great joy in helping people.

I love the DIY Athos and it need not be a super expensive project.

I akin it to a candle, I have the candle lit in my backyard and I love helping light other candles of good Sauna.

- A little pile of wood and some water, and you've got your therapist.

(upbeat music) I like this.

I feel like saying, welcome to my Sauna, (laughs).

My name is Patty Salo Downs, and I'm here in my backyard at my Sauna.

(door bangs) Well, I wanted a screen door and this was a custom built Sauna, so we could have it the way we wanted.

I remember as a little girl at my grandma's and when you heard this screen door slam, you knew it was either your turn or somebody else's.

And that to me, brought back just really great memories.

So Wednesday night, Saturday nights were Sauna nights and it was just so refreshing and a great way to get clean and relaxed.

And that's what I really appreciate about the Sauna, it's so relaxing when that steam is, just surrounding you and you're laying on a bench and you just can't let go and be at peace.

(hissing sound) The other critical thing that I wanted in the Sauna was that little window in between the cold room and the steam room.

And the little window in old-fashioned Saunas, they were always used for putting the kerosene lamp.

(hitting sound) The connection to the family, we grew up in Saunas.

Actually Saunas were used as a laundry room, way back when my mom did laundry in the Sauna and babies were born in the Sauna and the dad, when they've died, they were cleaned in the Sauna.

So it's really the cycle of life.

- [Narrator] I think the tradition here has held because of the culture and the wellness behind it.

It's really integrated into my grandparents' life that they every week take Saunas.

- [Narrator] Fins have a line that says every Sauna has its own soul and it is really true, when you're sitting on the Sauna bench you can really feel the spirit of a Sauna and the heart of a Sauna is of course, the Sauna stove.

- Heat is the first ingredient.

If you don't have that, that's the first thing you invest in.

An hour and a half North of here in Tyler Minnesota is Lamppa manufacturing and they make the Kuuma stove.

I would say it's the best American-made Sauna stove that there is.

- In Finish, it means hot.

I'm Garrett Lamppa, I'm a CEO of Lamppa Manufacturing.

My great grandpa, Richard was kind of the go-to guy for a Sauna stove.

- So as far as we know, this was the first Sauna that Daryl's grandfather built, it little bit about in the 1930s, a lady out on the Lake here, that was about 92 years old called up Daryl to see if he wanted to buy back his grandfather's Sauna.

- [Garrett] That my grandpa Herbert had owned the dairy, which was our old factory up on in Tower over here and him and my dad Daryl, collaborated together and kept tinkering and testing, and tinkering and testing and developed our Kuuma Sauna stove line that way.

- Just like imagine a cold winter's night in Tower, Minnesota and they're out there testing and iterating and welding more nuances and they really leaned into the art of creating the most-efficient wood burning stove that they could and they did it.

- A year ago this month, we moved into this facility, this is a 9,000-square foot facility.

This was made possible through the IRRRB.

They helped finance the construction of the new building.

Yeah, so we got in here last September.

- [Narrator] Coming from the manufacturing facility we had before to this is, it's night and day.

- [Narrator] In the old building, it was almost more like a blacksmith shop, it was, everything was kind of one-off, one-off, one-off - Our process has just improved so much from Morgan doing customer service on a telephone, she is fantastic with people and then Dale for his manufacturing background is super strong and vision he had for laying out this new facility over here, has, it was instrumental in making this thing work.

- Getting into this building allowed us to really take some significant steps forward.

So we'll kind of start at the beginning.

This is just raw steel.

All of our steel is US steel.

We go from the raw steel into sub-assemblies.

- [Narrator] We have found some really quality employees in the local area over here.

Being able to provide a living wage in a small town like Tower is something that I'm super proud of.

I want to be a good employer for the region over here.

And we want employees that are passionate about our product and we have that right now.

And it's something that is really nice to see on a daily basis.

- [Narrator] Steve is 77 years old, so I call him our intern but he's been here a long time and he has no desire to retire and we have no desire to lose him.

Rick is actually working on one of the Sauna stoves right now.

So this one's getting pretty, pretty far along, pretty close to being completed and Rick's also our shop foreman.

- [Narrator] The question is how many how many adults does it take to move a Kuuma stove?

And I think the answer is three and a Dolly.

I mean it's 350 pounds without the firebrick and without the rocks on top.

- Once they come out of the weld shop, we come out here and this is where we do paint prep.

The key is in the preparation as with any painting.

From there, it'll go into the paint booth.

Once they come out, they're painted, they'll look like this.

For my dad, Daryl Lamppa, spent countless hours running this whole operation, basically with one or two other guys.

He not only was known as probably the best welder in the area but he handled all the customer service, all the ordering, all the final inspection on everything and he did that probably for close to 30 years.

- [Narrator] I joke that the Kuuma cures all building ills.

I mean, you can be off in a lot of your nuances of your build but the Kuuma makes up for a lot of that.

- I have focused on getting word out there on just not only the quality of materials that we use in the product but then the longevity of the products as well.

So the best way to do that is having people share their experiences and if you spend any time on Sauna forums on Facebook, Kuuma comes up and people swear by it and something that makes me very proud because I know all the hard work that my great grandpa, my grandpa and my dad had put into this.

- Well, even just lighting the fire and to hear the sound of the fire and the flames dancing, it's just very soul-satisfying.

And I think the Sauna for me has a real heart-soul connection too because not only is it about cleaning the body, it's about cleaning the mind, clearing the mind and that to me is the most gratifying part.

- I moved to Minnesota after living in Europe, in Northern Europe specifically and becoming just a huge fan of Sauna and nature, the birches, the Pines, the shield lakes, the granite outcroppings.

I love that topography and I moved to Minnesota because of, I love that topography.

So one of the first things I did is I purchased a Kuuma stove and and build a Sauna.

That was like a quest of mine that I was so happy to do 30 years ago and live it today.

(hissing sound) - The healing aspects of it, I believe are just the relaxation of it and the aroma inside it's all Cedar and you smell that when you walk in and the Sauna Vastas that people like to make you put this Sauna on hot rocks, after it's been soaking in water for a while, you put this Sauna on the hot rocks and let it heat up and then you very gently, just, put it over your body.

And it helps with blood circulation.

And the rhythmic action is once again a very spiritual experience and of course the aroma that Cedar, it's a Ihana, as they would say in Finnish, which means more beyond wonderful.

- We put the Kuuma stove in our big community Sauna it's on Lake Superior 'cause it was the local option.

It was the folks that we knew and we got, we built a relationship with.

It's built to last, it's, burns really efficiently which matters in our world of thinking through how do we do things with a little bit more eye towards environmental friendly?

My name is Justin Juntunen, CEO and founder of Cedar and Stone Nordic Sauna, based here in Duluth, Minnesota.

I knew we needed to start with an experience because the experience economy, that's what people come up to Duluth for.

That's burgeoning, so much of the business plan work was around wellness and boutique wellness.

People want those experiences of the North while they're here.

I think Sauna is one of the best experiences of the North.

One of the top questions was, do you build these?

And I knew that we'd be asked that, especially when we built this big one, that was beautiful.

And so from the get go, I've always said, yes, we absolutely build these.

This is part of the plan.

It was just a question of how is that gonna happen?

And what COVID did was it dialed back the experience side 'cause we for four months had to shut down and be safe.

And it just totally put jet fuel into the build side.

- [Narrator] Come on in.

- And welcome to our shop, this is the home of Cedar and Stone Sauna Building Operation.

I'm Joel Vikre and this is where we build stuff.

When we're building a Sauna, we typically begin by building the base.

Steel makes a great foundation because it's incredibly strong and rigid but it also allows us to basically turn the Sauna into a trailer so we can bring it from our shop here to site.

We set it down on piers and remove the trailer bits.

And then you have your building right there.

So it's an efficient way of building and delivering it.

Once we build a frame, then we start to build essentially a small building on top of it.

We customize each one to the site it's going to, where we put the windows, how it's gonna be situated, which way the roof slopes, whether it has any overhangs or porches, things like that.

And then we customize the layout on the interior, so it relates to nature, the best.

There wasn't a Sauna that I've taken have no windows or like a tiny window but we like huge windows.

So we just put, went in, I think you're gonna go see it where one whole wall is a window looking at it on like superior.

So if you use the right kind of glass and the right installation, you can get away with that.

And it makes it much more of like a nature experience instead of just being in a little room real hot.

- My wife and I were living in the Pittsburgh area for awhile and Pittsburgh winters weren't cold enough, so we knew we were coming back home and we were excited to be with family and we loved Minnesota.

And in that summer we went over to Scandinavia.

We did this kind of genealogy tour and we were in Finland and we did this Sauna that was floating on the Baltic.

And we got into this rowboat with this Finnish man and he rode us out and left us on this raft, the Sauna and swim.

And I told my wife that day, I said, hey, if this could happen in the US, it would happen in Duluth.

And that was over a decade ago.

And, so the idea of the business, not just the tradition and growing up with it really started then.

And then we moved back to Duluth and we fell in love with the city again.

I want the flourishing of Duluth and the people that are here and anybody who comes to play here and the how Sauna has sort of became the how to do that.

And we began envisioning it and my wife was like, hey, I need to see some like details, you can't just tell a good story, like, what does this look like on paper and on?

So we wrote the 47-page business plan and we did all that, the legwork and it was like, you know what?

This really could work here.

One of those examples was working with Jesse and Kamiah at the on Lake superior and we had already built it.

And I set up the meeting and I brought the mobile Sauna to him and I said, Jesse, here's what I wanna do.

I wanna guide people through this process of Sauna.

People come up here to Duluth, they wanna relax, they wanna get away, they wanna adventure.

I wanna do that right here, right on the shores of Lake superior right next to the hotel.

Here's how I think we could do it.

- [Narrator] Justin is a, he's an evangelist, he's a spiritual guide in a way and he's a special person that way to help guide people through Sauna.

- He walked in and he said, this place is beautiful.

I can see that, I can see people wanting that.

We just found the right people that we had been working with and, the main kind of crux of that was beginning to work with Joel Vikre.

And we hired Joel and Nick, another great craftsmen to build our benches in the community space.

And there's these beautiful sinuous kind of waterfall-looking benches with clear Cedar and they're like furniture and Joel and I just kept talking and we said, hey, we should think about a way to do more than just benches, we should do the whole thing.

- So one of the things that is most fun about this are the people who are involved.

So we've got a team of a retired professional ballet dancer.

We have an opera singer and college professor.

We've got a guitar maker.

We have a couple of like apprentices.

- We've been building a team and I've been more impressed and more proud, not of just the beautiful structures we built but the fact that we've built a team and we've paid people, salaries and money and hours that have fed their families during one of the hardest times.

- With COVID people are working kind of weird schedules so they can accommodate family needs and stuff like that.

But it's a great team.

- When I watched Duluth businesses make things, many of them are trying to not say, we're gonna make the cheapest product for you, we're gonna make the most quality.

And I look at Lowell furniture, that's beautiful and modern and thoughtful in its design and lasts.

I think that's what we're trying to do.

I often heard that success wasn't built around, did you do the thing?

Success is really measured by you being obedient to the call.

I think I'm doing the thing that I'm built for in the city that I love and not many people get to say that.

(upbeat music) - Sauna is an cold as a great healing mechanism.

- There are multiple ways throughout culture that people have said, what is cold and hot do for our health?

(mumbles) makes you feel great.

- And I even heard that when the Finnish Parliament had difficult decisions, they use the Sauna, (laughs), they went and took a Sauna and they were able to work it out.

So I think, yeah, if you've got kind of a cranky marriage, it could actually improve your relationship.

So you might want to invest in a Sauna.

(upbeat music)