Evolve to stay in pool and spa industry

Ty Hermans, director of Evolve, has expressed disappointment that his proposed DOCA wasn't accepted by the Poolrite creditors, but has reiterated his commitment to remain in the swimming pool industry and introduce innovative new products.

“We’re disappointed, but congrats to AstralPool,” says Hermans. “We’ll be concentrating now on a stress-free handover of the Poolrite range.

“We’ve got a lot of stock. It’s a shame – we’d just got on top of the supply issues when this happened. But we’ll be doing an orderly handover and will still be honouring all the warranties for the products we manufactured.

“But like I said before, we’re in the pool industry for the long haul. We’d have liked that to have been with the Poolrite range, but the whole Poolrite thing only brought our plans forward. We’d always planned to get involved in the pool industry and bring some innovative products to market,” he says.

“We’ve got a good history of launching innovations in different industries,” he says. “For example, I’m here in Italy at the moment launching an automotive product.”

He says he was very proud of some of the technical improvements his engineers had made to some of the Poolrite products, and the new thinking they brought from their experience in six or seven other core industries.

“It was great to throw the Poolrite engineers and the Evolve engineers together in the same room. And one thing we noticed was how insular the pool industry is, and how the Evolve engineers brought a fresh perspective to some of the problems. Also, how most of the innovations in the pool industry have been incremental.

“We want to stir things up with an innovative approach. We’ll concentrate on one or two niche products and supply ancillary products around that.”

Hermans plans a soft launch in July or August in time for the beginning of the season.

“But that’s just our plan at the moment. The last thing we want to do launch before the products have been fully tested. We learnt that that hard way from dealing with some of the Poolrite products.

“The aim is to be ready to come out in the Australian season, but if that doesn’t happen we might launch in the northern season.”