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Bigger, Stronger, Lighter™
The Future of Spas is LFI - Romeo RIM
Long fiber injection (LFI) is quickly increasing in popularity across a wide array of industries and, in particular, the Spa market. LFI provides a cost effective alternative to a variety of cabinet materials and allows greater design freedom and surface finish options.
This technology is attractive to the spa market because it can produce highly durable, large-format paneling which eliminates post-assembly of smaller panels and has extremely high dimensional stability preventing it from warp and shrink in extreme conditions. As a result, Spa customers who have used LFI technology have enjoyed reduced shipping damage and replacement costs, as well as lower warranty claims.
LFI parts are stronger, lighter, and more customizable than other traditionally manufactured pieces. With advanced technology you can even achieve in-mold painting which eliminates the post-paint process.
The popularity of LFI is so great that Romeo RIM has invested heavily in an innovative, fully automated rotary system incorporating seven molding presses on a track that is about as big as a hockey rink to significantly boost production capacity and efficiency. And with the ability to change molds off-line, the LFI process can be done more quickly than ever before.
Romeo RIM provides its spa customers with 3 different options for producing a spa panel that will change the face of your company.
- Utilize Romeo RIM’s Horizon series panel and corner to customize the color and light sconce.
- Bring your design concepts and let their design engineers bring your exclusive creation to life.
- Collaborate with their industrial designers to design a cabinet from your ideas and inspiration.
With this new system, Romeo RIM can produce patterns and designs in hot tub panels previously not available anywhere in the industry — including the ability to simulate leather, wood grain, or 3D geometric patterns — improving a spa’s look as well as making it stronger, lighter, and more impact resistant. These new spas will be more durable because they are fiberglass and polyurethane, reducing dealer shipping damage replacement costs, and there won’t be any warping around fasteners because there isn’t any expansion or contraction.
Romeo RIM’s CEO Randy Johnson recently announced our new rotary system and pointed to the ability to increase our capacity to 30,000 spas or roughly fifteen percent of the entire spa market, but judging by what we’ve seen so far many believe that number can be even higher.
Romeo RIM will be at the International Pool | Spa | Patio Expo this week, and we’ll have a sample of our handiwork at the Premium Leisure booth 449. The work we’ve done for Premium and work we’re doing for other customers reflects the innovation and creativity of the automotive industry, believe it or not.
Romeo RIM is located just north of Detroit, Michigan, and many people on our team have experience and ties to the automotive industry. For one of our hot tub designs, we took swatches from hot tub client as well as some picture of cars, then gave it to an industrial designer who put it all together into a hot tub design. The same sleek, pulse-quickening designs you see in modern automobiles can now be implemented into spa designs, thanks to LFI molding and in-mold painting technology. Where in the past you’d have customers buying dull, boring wooden box spas and sticking them in a gazebo or behind some expensive, complex landscaping, the new LFI-molded spas Romeo RIM is helping to create stand out on their own as an exciting focal point in any setting, further enhancing their attractiveness to buyers.
We’re truly at a tipping point in the spa industry with our ability to have spa manufacturers come to us with creative ideas and inspiration, and with our industrial designers we can take any design from concept to completion, all the way to tooling.
Check out our design at Premium Leisure’s booth 449, or contact Adam Ritchie at 586-336-5881 or on Twitter (@adritchie523) to see even more concepts or talk specifics about the incredible ways Romeo RIM is taking the spa industry into the future.