My name is Ian Mewett; I am the owner of Compass Pools. Most fortunately for me, I have been married now for 38 years to my wife and co owner Kerri. We have two sons who both work in what is our family owned business. We have two daughters in- laws, two grandchildren, and two grand dogs.

Compass Pools began in June 1980 enthusiastically on what we thought was a “good idea at the time”.

I had served in the Australian navy as an engineer prior to meeting Kerri. Our dream was to sail around the world, one problem we needed a boat!. So the answer to this dilemma was to start a small boat building and repair business. The plan was one day to build our own 17m yacht. This turned out not to be the best idea when the reality of becoming parents sunk in, so the solution?! Why not start a pool company?

With little else than a belief that the opportunity existed to build a better pool than was manufactured at that time, and with my engineering and boat building experience, we set up our first factory, created the Riviera pool design, manufactured the tooling, and delivered our first pool in just under the first three months of operation. In that first year we managed to sell over 150 pools and set up the beginnings of the Compass dealer network. The rest, as they say, is a colorful history.

Over 30 years have passed since that humble beginning, with each one of those years having its own unique story of both success and failure. I can summarize them all by saying there is yet to be a boring moment. Today there are over 30,000 Compass Pools in Australia, of which since 1995 approaching 20,000 are Ceramic Composite. Compass technology has been used by other manufacturers under licensing agreements in Australia and the USA and in Compass Pools Europe. Today there are over 60,000 ceramic composite pools produced worldwide.

The first principal of Compass Pools was, and still is, to build the best swimming pools. The development of Compass products is not by accident. It happened that way because in the beginning I was not an accountant, or an advertising man, or a sales executive, or for that matter even a businessman. However, I was a fibreglass tradesman, with a do-it-better-than-anyone-else attitude and more than enough ego and conviction to begin the Compass story. For better or for worse Compass Pools was always going to be driven by the quality of the pool it produced and fortunately as time has shown, this has proven to be a very enduring asset. It is the vision to do it better that has produced the Ceramic Composite technology, the Bi-Luminite surfaces and of course the Vantage Pool.

Of course many capable people, not the least being my everyday co-owner and wife Kerri, have made important contributions to the story over the years. Today, Compass has two manufacturing facilities on the East Coast of Australia and the most successful dealer network in Australia and New Zealand.

Let’s face it, a swimming pool is a big purchase. I want our customers to be just as happy in 10 or 20 years as they were the day they bought their pool. This is why we continue to invest heavily in research and development, and continue to set the benchmark in the fiberglass pool industry.