Massage Chair Industry Update – 04/24/2013

April 29, 2013
 By Dr. Alan Weidner
April 29, 2013
 By Dr. Alan Weidner

Massage Chair Industry Update – 04/24/2013


Transcript of Video Titled “Massage Chair Industry Update 04/24/2013”

Alan: Hi, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ and today we are doing our April 24th massage chair industry update, our biweekly update on the news and notes and happenings going on in the massage chair world.

[SCREEN TEXT: Stock Status]

Alan: As usual, let’s begin with stock status. The Panasonic MA70 is on back-order until June. Apparently, they’ve sold far more than they anticipated and the strain is in the back-order now, so wait until June. If you want to get one, as I always recommend with these popular chairs, order now or order soon. Don’t wait until the chairs are in, because when they do come in, they may already be spoken for. The IT-9800 in ‘Black’ is back-ordered until May 1st, so another week. The iJoy-2580 – HT-2580 – in ‘Black’ is also back-ordered until early May. And Inada is good, Omega is good, all the other chairs for Infinity and Human Touch and Panasonic are good. I might mention that I haven’t heard back from Osaki. I asked them for a stock update and I haven’t received it, but I do know that the 7200H is back-ordered for another two to three weeks and I’m not sure how their other status is. I know they were back-ordered on the OS-3000; they are contemplating some style changes to that chair, so I’m not sure if the new shipment that does come in will be the different model or the different design or styling, but I will of course keep you posted.

[SCREEN TEXT: Used Inada Sogno (Creme) – $7299]

Alan: This is of interest to people who love the Inada Sogno, and we sell an awful lot of these chairs, they’re wonderful chairs, but I have a used one. It’s only a couple months old, we’re selling it for $7299, it’s a ‘Creme’ colored chair, it’s pristine. The person that returned it to me, the packaging looks like it was never unpacked in the first place, it’s perfectly packed. I’m assured that it’s in excellent condition and cleaned up and looks like a brand new chair. So, if you’re interested in that chair, the Inada Sogno, give me a call on my personal cell number, 801-651-2026, and I can answer questions for you about that chair or help you place your order. We have to do it over the phone because we don’t have that price and model – the $7299 price – in our system, so we’d have to do it over the phone. So give me a call if you’re interested in it. The warranty is all still good; you know, Sogno comes with a 3-year, in-home, parts-and-labor warranty, and that warranty is still good minus a couple of months that it was previously used. Let me know, it’s a very good buy on an $8000 chair.

[SCREEN TEXT: Visit from Cliff Levin, President of Inada USA]

Alan: Speaking of Inada, Cliff Levin visited us last week. He flew in from Colorodo to visit us, he does this annually and I really enjoy my visits with him. Cliff and I have become good friends over the years in doing business together. We both have a very similar approach to taking care of customers and being service oriented and doing whatever it takes to make the customer happy. I appreciate that, and Cliff came out and we had a nice visit. We talked again about the Sogno – and I get asked this all the time by customers – Is there a new Sogno coming out? Is there an upgrade to the Sogno? Is there another model that’s better than the Sogno? And the answer to all those questions, and I always ask Cliff when I see him, is “No.” They’re not planning any changes to the Sogno – any of significance, anyways – and they’re not planning any super model that’s going to be bigger than the Sogno anytime soon. Who knows what they’ve got in the works for the next couple of years, but for now the Sogno is still the cat’s meow, it’s still their top-of-the-line chair and they’re not planning anything different. I have had some questions from customers about a chair Inada has in Japan called the 3S, and it is a chair that is kind of like a bit of a stripped-down Sogno, but it is not a chair we’re going to be seeing here in the US as far as I’m told. I do get a number of questions about it, though, and people are aware that Inada sells that chair in Japan, but the plans are not to have them here in the United States. But anyways, thanks Cliff for visiting and thanks for buying dinner, it was awesome!

[SCREEN TEXT: Video Interview with Mark Holmes, COO Cozzia]

Alan: Also speaking of heads of massage chair companies, I had an opportunity to interview Mark Holmes, who is the COO of Cozzia massage chairs. Mark lives in Hong Kong for the most part but part-time in the United States, largely because of the launch of the Cozzia line over the past couple of years. It’s a three-part interview; it was a 45-minute interview, and I just divided it up into three parts. You can see the interview on YouTube and you can learn a little bit more about the Cozzia chairs. Cozzia used to create the chairs for the Burke line of chairs, which went out of business a couple years ago. A couple of fellows, one US fellow and Mark, who represents the company that actually manufactures the chairs in China, they pulled together to create the Cozzia line, which is taking the distributors of the Burke line and some of the old models of the Burke line and adding some new models and continuing to distribute these chairs in America. And the Cozzia chairs are a new line we’ve started carrying. I’m not terribly familiar with them and we haven’t had a tremendous amount of feedback, but you know what they say: No news is good news. The fact that I haven’t heard too much about Cozzia probably means that they’re handling their business well and managing the customers well. So, anyways, watch that interview if you’re interested in Cozzia chairs or just interested in the industry and want to hear what Mark has to say about his chairs and the industry as a whole.

[SCREEN TEXT: New Luraco Intro Video]

Alan: Also, speaking of videos, Luraco – who make the iRobotics 6 chair – I know they’re trying hard to break into the massage chair market. The iRobotics chair is a nice chair, and there are some real benefits to having a chair made in the United States because the quality control is better and it’s quicker. We can have changes made in an instant, and I think I talked a couple weeks ago about how they made a change to the remote control that I had on my chair here in Utah, because it kept shorting out. They were able to make a minor change and send me a new remote, and now the chair works wonderfully and we haven’t had a problem since. So, anyways, Luraco put out a video that introduces the viewer to Luraco: who they are, what they’re about, their history, and what they’re doing now. It’s a good video, so I posted it on my blog. So if you can go to my website and take a look at the blog, you can watch that video and get a feeling for who Luraco is and who the people are that are behind this iRobotics 6 chair, which as I’d mentioned before is considered to be the first chair to be US made even though the body and frame and 39% of the chair is created in China. It’s imported here, and the mechanical components, the electrical components, the computer components – they’re all made here, and the assembly is done here. So it is a 61% US-, 39% Chinese-made chair, but a nice chair and the great thing is they do everything here in the United States so there is much quicker leeway with the quality control.

[SCREEN TEXT: 2013 ADEX Awards for Human Touch – Congratulations!]

Alan: Also, I might mention that Human Touch received some ADEX Awards – ADEX stands for Award for Design Excellence – and they received a gold award for their ZeroG 4.0, a silver award for their ZeroG 2.0, and I believe the platinum, the top award, for one of their Perfect chairs. So congratulations to Human Touch, they’re a good company. I really enjoy the people there; they’re just all about massage chairs and they design very nice chairs and engineer nice chairs. As I mention in a previous video, I really have come to like the ZeroG 4.0. I love the intensity of it, I love the simplicity of it, I love the design of it, the functionality of it, I love the technology of it. So congratulations to Human Touch on those wonderful awards.

[SCREEN TEXT: Roller Track Length Article]

Alan: I wrote a couple of blog articles this last week. In one of them, I’m talking about the length of the roller track. The rollers in the back of a massage chair are on a track, and that track extends from the neck down to the low back. Well, some are 24 inches long, some are 31 inches long, and the rest are in between. The longest we have is a 31-inch track; we see that on the Osaki 7075R and the Panasonic MA70. They both – and I talk about this in the article, so I won’t go into it in great detail here – in the article, I talk about how the MA70 feels like the rollers are going lower on the low back than they do on the Osaki OS-7075. The track is the same length, it’s 31 inches, but the rollers do go lower in the Panasonic and you can feel them down on the buttocks, and the reason is the zero gravity function. You’ll probably wonder why but I won’t go into it, but go ahead and read the article. I wrote it earlier this week and it talks about how zero gravity and the tilt of the seat affects the way rollers can reach the low back. But that’s a good article and it explains a lot about the way these roller tracks work.

[SCREEN TEXT: Measuring How Loud your Massage Chair Is!]

Alan: Now, I also did another article. I had a lot of fun with this article, I just wrote it last night, but I’ve been working on the research for it, the data for it for the last week. I had a customer email me about three, maybe four weeks ago asking me about the Sogno and if the Sogno was a quiet enough chair that, if he had it in his bedroom and his wife was asleep next to him and he was watching TV or whatever, would the chair be quiet enough that it wouldn’t wake up his wife. And I thought, “Well, I’ve never been asked that question before,” so I ran down to the showroom and I listened to the chair, and I thought, “Well, yeah, it seems quiet.” Because you don’t think of half of these things when people ask them because I’ve never thought of that before so I never never really knew how to answer him. So I went down to the showroom and I listened to the chair, and the chair seems quiet, but the thought came to my mind, “How do you quantitatively measure that?”

Well, a customer of mine, Phil Ruhnke, came in a couple weeks later – he’s from Illinois and he was in town visiting to check out the massage chairs – and I posed this question from this other customer to him, and Phil has got some history with tools and measuring and scientific data evaluation, gathering. So he had the idea of downloading an app on my Droid, on my cell phone that is a sound meter, something that will measure the decibels of whatever it is that you’re trying to measure. So I downloaded this app and I turned it on, and I could measure how many decibels my voice was measuring, how many decibels a chair was measuring. So I thought, “This is fantastic, why don’t we create a little study and measure how loud each chair is?” So that’s what I did. It took me a few days to gather the data because I spent up to five minutes on each chair, and of course had to deal with some ambient noise and deal with some of the parameters that were affecting the study. But I basically came out with a range for each of these chairs that we tested, and we tested eleven out of the fourteen chairs in our showroom. I put that data in a blog post just last night, on the 23rd. I posted that data last night and you can take a look at it. It’s kind of cool; I never ever thought of doing something like that, so I’d like to thank the customer that asked about how quiet the Sogno was. Now you can find out for sure which of these chairs is the most quiet, and which is the noisiest, and what contributes to the noise. Anyways, take a look at it, it’s a great little article. It’s just a research study on the sound levels of certain massage chairs, so if that’s a concern to you, that you want to have the quietest chair around, take a look at the data and that will give you a good idea.

You know, I think that is just about everything we have this week. If you have any questions, feel free to give me a call; I am always available. You can reach me at our toll-free number, 888-259-5380. You can visit the website, ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com.’ You can check us out on Facebook or Twitter, and by the way, if you find these videos helpful, this information helpful, please feel free to ‘Like’ us on Facebook and on YouTube or share us on Facebook or on Twitter. And please subscribe to our YouTube channel, because as I put out these subsequent videos about updates or about other massage chairs and the reviews we do of them, you would be notified of those and then you can follow up and check out what we’ve got cooking. We really do appreciate you visiting here today. We look forward to seeing you in two more weeks. I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from Massage Chair Relief, and have a fantastic day! We’ll see you, bye-bye.

 

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