How Canadian Spa Company UK Builds Trust and Grows with Honest Content and Aftercare
Troy Labelle, Founder & Managing Director of Canadian Spa Company UK, shares how the brand’s straightforward approach to hot tubs and swim spas has set them apart in a competitive market. This interview reveals how honest content and a focus on aftercare have driven more qualified leads and created lasting customer relationships.
In this edition of the Ecommerce Authority Playbooks series, we dive into how
Canadian Spa Company UK grows, retains customers, and prepares for the future of search in 2026 and beyond.
The interview
1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Troy Labelle: Canadian Spa Company was founded in Canada in 1986, building hot tubs designed to be used through hard Canadian winters, and we opened our UK office in 1998 to bring that brand to the British market directly rather than through middlemen. What makes us different isn’t a single feature, it’s the honesty of the offer. We carry the full ladder, from a £299 plug-and-play inflatable through to ten-thousand-pound acrylic spas and swim spas, so we can tell a customer the truth about what suits them instead of pushing everyone toward the biggest unit. Our hot tubs plug into a normal socket, so there’s no electrician. Our warranty is two years’ parts and labour with no mandatory annual service to keep it valid — rarer in this trade than it should be. And we stock replacement covers and parts for spas we didn’t even sell. In a category full of hype and big headline numbers, we compete on being straight with people.
2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?
Troy Labelle: The biggest shift was treating our website as a decision-support tool rather than a catalogue. Early on we listed products and prices like everyone else. The turning point was realising that people spending several thousand pounds online don’t need another product grid — they need their actual questions answered: will it physically fit down the side of my house, what base does it need, what will it cost to run, what does the warranty really cover. When we started publishing genuinely useful buying guides and checklists, the quality of enquiries went up and wrong-fit conversations went down. The second was treating aftercare and replacement covers as a real business line, not an afterthought. A hot tub is bought once, but covers wear out, chemicals run out, and people want to use the spa more. Leaning into that turned one-off transactions into an ongoing relationship — and a more predictable, more profitable one.
3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?
Troy Labelle: Organic search is the backbone, because this is a high-consideration purchase and people research for weeks before they buy — they’re Googling “hot tub running costs” and “swim spa vs hot tub” long before they’re ready. Email is second, and it does its hardest work after the sale: aftercare, accessories, seasonal prompts and cover replacements. Third is direct and word-of-mouth, including the phone — for a four-figure purchase, a real conversation often closes what the website started. The big lesson is that in a high-ticket category the job of a channel isn’t to hard-sell, it’s to remove doubt. Paid clicks are easy to buy but they convert poorly if the page behind them doesn’t answer the buyer’s real worries. We get far more from content that builds trust over a long research cycle than from anything that chases a quick click.
4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?
Troy Labelle: We’ve stopped optimising for exact-match keywords and started writing to be genuinely useful and genuinely quotable — because that’s what both Google’s helpful-content direction and AI assistants reward. When someone asks ChatGPT “what should I check before buying a hot tub,” we want our guidance to be the substance behind that answer. In practice that means structuring content as clear questions with direct, specific answers, real dimensions and running-cost figures, and honest comparison pages rather than thin keyword pages. We’ve also started watching referrals from AI assistants in our analytics as a real, growing channel, not a novelty. The mindset shift is from “how do we rank for this phrase” to “how do we become the source a person — or an AI — would cite.” Authority and accuracy travel across both Google and the assistants; keyword tricks don’t.
5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?
Troy Labelle: For a product people buy once, “repeat” means accessories, chemicals, replacement covers, upgrades — and referrals. The touches that work best are the practical ones: helping a customer actually get the spa set up and used, especially through winter when a hot tub is at its best and most likely to be abandoned if the experience is awkward. We follow up with genuinely useful guidance rather than just offers, we make replacement covers and parts easy to reorder, and we stay reachable by phone when something goes wrong. Advocacy mostly takes care of itself if the product earns its place — a steaming swim spa in a nicely finished garden is its own marketing, so we encourage customers to share photos and reviews. The throughline is simple: be as helpful after the sale as you were before it, and people both come back and bring others.
6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?
Troy Labelle: Double down on three things: decision-support content that answers the buyer’s real questions, aftercare and retention so a one-off sale becomes a relationship, and plain honesty in your warranty and pricing — transparency is a genuine competitive edge in a hype-heavy market. Spend your energy becoming the most trustworthy explainer in your niche. What I’d stop entirely: chasing vanity keyword rankings and publishing thin SEO pages that don’t actually help anyone — they’re a dead end now. I’d also stop treating discounting as the only growth lever; in a considered purchase, trust converts better than a price cut. And I’d stop paying for low-quality links or placements that have nothing to do with your category — one genuinely relevant mention is worth more than fifty irrelevant ones, and the irrelevant ones can quietly work against you.
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