I want to say something that might surprise you: the most compelling content in our entire knowledge base isn't always the peer-reviewed papers or the Huberman protocols. Sometimes it's the founders. The people who looked at the science, felt it personally, and decided to build their life around making it accessible to others.
Pete Nelson is one of those people. CESU Saunas — the name itself worth pausing on. It's a Finnish concept: perseverance, tenacity, bravery, grit. Sisu is the Finnish word, and it refers to a particular quality of inner strength that Finns have long associated with their relationship to the cold and heat. The fact that Pete named his company after this concept, after an XPT experience in Hawaii that changed his relationship to thermal therapy, tells you something about the depth of the mission.
Nearly 1,800 saunas in three years. That is not a hobby project. That is a market responding to genuine demand, and it reflects something I see consistently across our knowledge base: the sauna wellness category is not saturating. Our database includes conversations with the founders of Othership in New York (who went from a garage to the largest sauna and ice bath studio in NYC), mobile sauna operators in Australia, infrared studio builders across North America — and every single one of them tells a version of the same story. The moment people actually experience a proper thermal contrast session, they want access to it regularly.
There's a pattern worth naming here. The XPT experience — Extreme Performance Training, Laird Hamilton's programme — appears in multiple founder stories across our database as a gateway. Pete's story follows this arc: fitness industry background, encounter with elite-level contrast therapy in a controlled setting, the visceral realisation that this needed to exist in their community. What XPT does is show people what proper cold and heat therapy can actually feel like, not the casual version they may have encountered at a hotel spa.
From a product perspective, what distinguishes CESU's approach in Pete's telling is the craftsmanship dimension — hand-built units, aesthetic intentionality, the sense that the sauna itself is an object worth inhabiting. This matters more than it might seem. We have research in our database — and it comes up in the Othership and Kiin Sauna interviews too — suggesting that the environment and ritual surrounding thermal therapy is not incidental to its effectiveness. The mind-body preparation, the transition between spaces, the intentionality of the session all appear to modulate stress hormone response and psychological outcome.
The Finnish tradition understood this. The sauna was never just a room that got hot. It was a sacred space for physical and psychological reset. Pete is building products that honour that understanding, and at 40 units per month, the market is clearly responding.
My recommendation if you're thinking about home sauna: don't buy cheap. Buy once. The quality of the wood, the quality of the heater, the insulation — these determine whether you actually use the thing. The research benefits require consistent use. A sauna that sits unused because it's uncomfortable or inefficient is not a wellness investment; it's a storage unit. CESU represents the kind of intentional build quality that makes consistent practice sustainable.