Born December 21, 1950, Rich Werber died April 7, 2021, after a brief battle with lung cancer. He founded and ran Great Atlantic Hot Tubs, Pools & Saunas with three locations in the Virginia Beach, Virginia, area and one in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Rich served as president of the National Pool and Spa Institute (now PHTA) and was a founding member of The Gemini Effect, a business group for Hot Spring dealers. Rich was also among the retailers who launched Pools.com, one of the first online pool and spa retail stores.
“Rich’s passion about selling hot tubs, came from one fundamental area, and that was opportunities he saw to help people improve their lives,” says Eileen Werber, Rich’s wife of 43 years. “He saw the opportunities to jump into an industry that was in its infancy stages, grow it and develop it and contribute and also to have something to call his own.”
Since Rich’s company was near a military base, he often hired military spouses, who would go on to work in other hot tub stores when they moved to a new duty station. “He was always looking at the next big thing,” says Joe Mahoney, former owner of Capital Hot Tubs and a close friend of Rich. “When I was trying to sell one hot tub, he was trying to sell 100.”
Mahoney says one of Rich’s lasting impacts, both on Mahoney and the hot tub industry as a whole, was showing that hot tubs could be a viable, standalone business. “He was one of the first who was really retailing hot tubs, and his store just had hot tubs,” Mahoney says.
“When I look back at Rich’s 43-year career, two things strike me,” Eileen says. “First is that he remained true to himself. The person I knew in private, the person he was to his friends and his family and the person he was in his business life was the same. Second, probably even more impressive was that he was focused on learning and growing with the business and also mentoring others to help them grow and be more successful in the business.”
