For much of their history, steel swimming pool kits were manufactured like cookie cutters. Manufacturers would typically offer a few different shapes—square, rectangle, oval, or octagonal—in a couple of different sizes, with a handful of choices for steps. The homeowner simply picked one from a book and that was that. Without the advantage of today’s technology, each steel panel had to be cut and bent by hand as manufacturers simply did not have the staff to complete all of the labour-intensive customization.