Cedar Sauna House: A Mobile Sauna Built for the Mountains
Last Updated on 30 July, 2026
How Joe Timm runs a 28-foot off-grid cedar sauna on a two-location seasonal rhythm — and why he left Mindbody to do it.
A 28-Foot Trailer, a Wood-Burning Stove, and a Battery Bank
Most fitness software customers operate from a fixed address. Joe Timm operates from wherever he parks the trailer.
Cedar Sauna House is a 28-foot mobile cedar sauna, fully off-grid, powered by a solar and battery system substantial enough to run a salon-style hot towel cabinet alongside the stove. Sessions run 75 minutes. Capacity tops out around 18 people. Towels are dry on the way in, warm and scented with essential oil on the way out, and laundered between visits.
The business runs on a two-location seasonal rhythm. In winter, the trailer sits in the parking lot of a Nordic ski center, catering to skiers coming off the trails. In summer, it relocates to a campground, where Memorial Day weekend marks the start of the warm-weather season. One sauna. One operator. Two distinct customer bases. No permanent storefront.
A Point of View Built Around the Customer’s Inbox
What sets Cedar Sauna House apart is not only the mobility. It is a deliberate restraint about how Joe treats the people who walk into his sauna. He has refused to build a marketing list off transactional data, telling customers explicitly that their email exists only so they have a record of their receipt.
“I made it a vow to not bother my customers. I hate me as a customer going to these different saunas… the marketing is so annoying.”
That stance shapes everything: a clean booking experience, no aggressive upsells, and a light touch on automated outreach. The business positions itself as a place to disconnect. Pricing is straightforward, the sauna runs hot through every open hour, and walk-ins are welcome alongside pre-bookings.
What Cedar Sauna House Offers
The core offering is a 75-minute open sauna session, priced as a single drop-in. Two punch pass tiers — a 4-pack and an 8-pack — are shareable with family and friends, so a parent can bring a child or a group can pool visits on one purchase. Private buyouts are available as 90-minute full-trailer rentals, arranged by direct inquiry through the website rather than public online booking.
Gift cards are tied to specific session passes rather than open dollar values. Discount codes are available as flat-dollar reductions on specific items. Drop-ins are part of the operating reality, not a fallback — the sauna is preheated during all posted open hours.
But right now, Joe is the entire staff. When someone helps on-site, they work under their profile.
Why Joe Left Mindbody for WellnessLiving
Joe spent his previous season on Mindbody and ended the relationship before the contract was up, buying himself out of the remaining months. He came to WellnessLiving with specific, lived-in frustrations and a tight timeline: he needed to be processing payments by his summer-season launch date.
His most common booking scenario was the problem. Most of his customers are not solo visitors — they are a parent trying to book themselves, a child, and a friend on a single shared punch pass. On Mindbody, this routinely failed. Customers would call him, unable to complete the booking, and he would burn three or four emails of back-and-forth per group just to collect payment and confirm spots. He needed group and guest booking that actually worked.
He needed shareable passes with explicit rules. A six-or-eight-punch pass that a parent could buy once and use across her household and friend group. WellnessLiving lets session passes be configured to share across spouses, children, siblings, parents, and friends — with the rules set at the pass level. That alone eliminated the most frequent service problem he was creating for himself.
He needed reporting he could actually navigate. Joe described Mindbody’s reports as “the biggest nightmare.” After reviewing the WellnessLiving back office during his sales demo, his read was direct: “Even the terminology on the tabs makes more sense when reading.”
He also valued that WellnessLiving lets a client use the same login across any WellnessLiving business they visit. For a sauna serving travelers and locals who may already use other wellness businesses, frictionless account recognition matters.
How WellnessLiving Fits a Mobile, Single-Operator Model
Cedar Sauna House operates differently from any other business in the area. No front desk, no staff schedule to manage, no fixed address. The platform has to flex around a phone-first owner who is also the technician keeping the stove hot.
Joe configured the sauna itself as the bookable resource, with working hours that map to whichever location is active for the season. When the season changes, the location detail, address, and special instructions update on the same service — no rebuilding the catalog from scratch.
The 4-pack and 8-pack passes share across spouse, child, sibling, parent, and friend relationships. A buyer can book multiple sessions in a single flow for guests added to their profile, and waivers can be sent ahead of arrival or signed on-site from Joe’s phone. The visual flag on the schedule makes unsigned waivers obvious at a glance.
Joe runs the business entirely from his phone through the WellnessLiving Elevate staff app. Check-ins, on-the-spot waiver signing, manual sales, and schedule edits all run from the same device he carries into the sauna. Drag-and-drop rescheduling on the calendar collapses what used to take multiple steps into a single gesture.
What Joe Is Building
Cedar Sauna House is in its first full cycle of seasonal operation. One winter at the Nordic center. One summer at the campground. Joe described the approach plainly: “I know what to expect there. I’ll see how this summer goes, and if those are two rock-solid things, then I’ll continue to expand.”
The business he has built is unusual by design. A sauna that exists to give people a quiet hour away from their phones, run by an operator who refuses to fill that hour with marketing noise before or after. A booking flow that works for a family on a shared pass. A back office that moves with the trailer.
Success looks like the sauna running hot and full through every posted hour, the seasonal transition handled without rebuilding anything, and customers arriving already signed, already paid, already knowing exactly what to expect.
That is Cedar Sauna House: a one-operator, off-grid sauna business built around the conviction that the best customer experience is a quiet one.
If you’re running a small, owner-operated wellness business — mobile, seasonal, or otherwise unconventional — and you’ve outgrown Mindbody’s limits around group bookings, shared passes, or multi-location flexibility, WellnessLiving is built to handle the way you actually work. Book a free, no-commitment demo today to see it.
