Bradford Products made its first splash in the Wilmington area more than 20 years ago, when the company moved to North Carolina from Connecticut.

The firm, which relocated from Wilmington to a bigger facility in Leland last year, manufactures stainless steel swimming pools, hot tubs, spas, steam rooms, saunas, reflecting pools, waterfalls and other custom specialty products for the high-end market.

And in the past year, the rapidly growing, family-owned company has added about 40 full-time employees for a total of at least 110, said Mike Brodeur, vice president of Bradford Products.

“Our market share has increased. There’s a lot of construction going on in the markets where we do a lot of work, which has just really driven a need to have more people, from engineering staff to sales staff to support staff, IT to manufacturing equipment,” Brodeur said.

The majority of the company’s thousands of orders have come from outside the Wilmington area, for development projects throughout the United States and world, he said. 

But the company has also had clients here. Custom homebuilder Mark Batson, owner of Tongue & Groove and his own pool company, AquaShapes, called Bradford Products for the elevated swimming pool feature of a house on Figure Eight Island.

“Since we wanted a pool that was going to go 40 feet off the ground, we needed a company that could build something that was lighter weight, that could pull off the shapes we wanted and also could do all of the elements we needed,” Batson said, referring to an acrylic end of the pool that allows swimmers an oceanside view, a custom fire pit and an infinity edge.

Founded in 1982 by Dale Brodeur Sr., Bradford Pools moved to Wilmington around 1994, and during the economic downturn, company officials expanded the firm’s horizons by making an important choice, Mike Brodeur said.

“We decided to invest a lot of time and resources into having an individual [Paul Greenman] travel throughout the United States and globally meeting with the big design firms, architectural firms, engineering firms and really presenting our product,” he said. “We developed an AIA [American Institute of Architects] course that offers continuing education hours, and it’s on stainless steel pools and the construction of them. It’s not geared toward us; it’s really geared toward stainless steel in general.”

The move seems to have paid off, Mike Brodeur said.

“As the economy started to rebound, we attribute a lot of our current success to his work as well as our sales people developing great relationships in their marketplaces to capitalize on that groundwork that was laid,” he said.

Mike Brodeur said while the company’s pools are popular, he also expects to see steady growth in the number of thermal rooms his firm is creating.

“We anticipate that we’re going to have additional product lines that will allow us to grow further,” he said.

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