Building a hot tub rental empire

After leaving Worth, Luca Quirici C'16 went to study Football Business and Media at UCFB Wembley, with the intention of becoming a sports journalist or working in TV. Having graduated three years later with a 2:1, he soon realised that working within the media wasn’t the career path he wanted to go down, but took a customer service based roll in a London accountancy firm.

In 2020 Luca's intention was to leave his job to go travelling, although Covid rather scuppered that plan. Instead, he chose to stick with the job and work from home. By December he was incredibly keen to find something more interesting to do and whilst chatting with a good friend in a pub one night they came up with a plan. Having become popular during lockdown with people stuck at home, portable hot tubs were almost impossible to buy at that time and so it was suggested they start a business hiring them out. After a few weeks of research, they managed to pick one up off Ebay, although "paid massively over the odds". As Luca goes on to explain, "We started by hiring it out to friends and family, but it was quickly in high demand, so we sourced a second and interest continued to grow."

Luca and his friend, Leo, had intended to juggle the hot tub hires around their day jobs, but within weeks orders went through the roof and they both resigned from their jobs, knowing they needed to concentrate on their expanding business which they named Surrey Bubbles.

"We quickly had to scale up" says Luca. "It started with just Leo, me and my car. By April this year we had two vans, 60 hot tubs and a storage unit. My mother runs the cleaning team, whilst my girlfriend oversees the marketing and helps with set-up. In June, we appeared on the Channel 5 documentary Hot Tub Brits: More Bubbles Please, in which our story was documented to over two million people, and we've featured on several business related podcasts and magazines."

Their recent social media marketing campaign 'The #bubblehunt' has been a  huge hit each week across social media with their tubs turning up in all sorts of interesting places!

Having now completed over 700 rentals , they’ve recently moved into new premises in Lingfield and are making plans to branch into surrounding counties – so it's looking like a very bubbly future!

 www.surreybubbles.com  @surreybubbles