Transcript of Video Titled “Massage Chair Industry Update – March 26th, 2013”

Alan: Hi, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ and today is our biweekly massage chair industry update. Today is March 26th, 2013, and we have a few things to chit-chat about today.

[SCREEN TEXT: Stock Status]

Alan: First of all, we’ll get into the stock status. Inada has a back order on the ‘Black’ leather Sogno; all other chairs are in stock. Human Touch is good on all of its stock. The Infinite Therapeutics is back-ordered on the ‘Black’ IT-9800, the ‘Black’ IT-8200, and the ‘Taupe’ IT-8200. Those chairs will be in April 3rd. By the way, the ‘Black’ Inada Sogno will be in April 18th. Panasonic, Omega, and Cozzia are good, and Osaki is back-ordered on the OS-1000 in ‘Brown’ and ‘Ivory’ for two more weeks, the OS-4000 in ‘Brown’ and ‘Ivory’ for the next two weeks, and the ‘Ivory’ OS-7075R is back-ordered but is expected in this week. So, that’s the status of those chairs. The Luraco iRobotics 6 massage chair, the new one that we’re carrying is in good stock.

[SCREEN TEXT: iRobotics 6 Colors: Black, Chocolate Brown, & Caramel]

Alan: And they just changed the colors; they have ‘Black,’ ‘Chocolate Brown,’ and ‘Caramel.’ Or ‘CARE-uh-mel’, however you want to say it. I guess down here they say ‘CAR-muhl.’ Up where I come from in Edmonton, they say ‘CARE-uh-mel.’ Or at least I think they do, I can’t remember now, but those are the three colors for the iRobotics 6.

[SCREEN TEXT: Brown & Charcoal OS-6000 Still Available. Please call for special pricing.]

Alan: The Osaki 6000, as I told you a couple of updates ago, they’ve discontinued the OS-6000 in lieu of the 7200H – which is the exact same chair except with heat – but there are some 6000s left. Even though we don’t have it on our website anymore and even though they are discontinued, they do have some ‘Brown’ and ‘Charcoal’ in stock and they’re trying to blow out that stock, so there is some special pricing I can give you if you give me a call. You have to call me though on my personal cell number, 801-651-2026, and we can chit-chat about special pricing on those colors. That is it for stock.

[SCREEN TEXT: Is Luraco iRobotics 6 a US or Chinese Made Chair??]

Alan: Now, as far as updates go, we haven’t received any new models in the showroom besides the MA70 from Panasonic, the ZeroG 4.0 from Human Touch, and the iRobotics 6 from Luraco. I will just mention that I wrote an article on my blog last week about whether the Luraco iRobotics 6 is truly an American-made chair or a Chinese-made chair, and there were some concerns expressed to me by people – not from Luraco but some other people had expressed concerns – that these chairs were Chinese because there were examples of the same body type, the same design of chair in a Chinese manufacturing company’s website. And so I did a little homework on that, gained some information from Luraco about that, because it would be very uncool to be advertising a chair made in the United States when in fact it is strictly imported from China. There are Chinese components in the chair – primarily in the body and the frame and the non-movable parts – but the mechanical, electronic parts are all manufactured and the chair is assembled in Dallas, Texas, according to Luraco, and that is how they filed it with the Department of Commerce and Federal Trade Commission.

I suspect that the chair truly is an American-made chair as they say it is, and I suspect there’s some confusion. The main confusion was the body design of the iRobotics 6 is the same body design that’s found on a website called ‘Dotast.com,’ which is a Chinese manufacturing company. And apparently, the design is proprietary to iRobotics, and they outsourced it to China because it was not economically feasible to have that body structure made here in the United States. So they outsourced it to China, and they gave Dotast permission to sell that body-shape design in China but they were not allowed to import it into the United States. They did that in exchange for the tooling on the molding and the manufacturing that Dotast did for Luraco with this iRobotics 6 chair. So that is how I’ve had it explained to me. Go and take a look on the blog and see the article I wrote; it goes into greater detail. I think the title is something like, ‘iRobotics 6 by Luraco: Made in United States or Not?’ And you can take a look at that and I go into greater detail.

[SCREEN TEXT: Software updates to be available for iRobotics 6 chair.]

Alan: Also on the iRobotics chair, one of the interesting features they want to add to that chair is program updates. So there is software that is integrated in the chair – and I believe this is how it is with most chairs – where you can program the function of the chair into the computer chip. And so you can change the way the chair functions by changing the computer programming. Of course, if the chair doesn’t have heat, you can’t program in heat; if the chair doesn’t have foot-rollers, you can’t program in foot-rollers; if it doesn’t have a head airbag, it’s difficult to program in a head airbag. You actually have to put in that hardware. But with the existing hardware, the software that manages that hardware can be updated, just like any other software program. So, like I update my QuickBooks software for my business accounting every year or two, and that is an update I pay a reasonable fee for and they give me the latest and greatest in regards to that software. Well, Luraco is going to be offering the same thing for their iRobotics 6 chair, and as we come to know more about that, we will share that on our blogs and whatnot.

[SCREEN TEXT: Incentives to Visit Our Massage Chair Relief Showroom in Utah!!]

Alan: I don’t really have too much more to say; I think that’s about it. It’s not a very busy week, not much to talk about. One thing I could talk to you about – and you’ll be seeing this on our website over the next week or so – we’re introducing a program. The last two Saturdays, we’ve had people fly into my showroom from out of state, and I have had people come from out of state: I’ve had people come from Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, Louisiana, California of course and local states around here, Illinois, Texas – we’ve had them from all over. These are people who are very, very serious about getting a massage chair, but they also don’t want to take a shot on a chair that they’ve never sat in. So they at their own expense come out to Salt Lake City to sit in our chairs, and some have been here for a couple of hours and some have been here for an entire day.

But what we’re going to do to make it manageable for people that want to come and try out our chairs – because you have to understand our store is one of the few in the country that has all the major name brands under one roof where you’ve got the Inadas, and the Panasonic, and Osaki, and Infinity, and Human Touch, et cetera, et cetera, all under one roof. So it’s really a conducive environment here in this showroom to shopping for massage chairs. Well, what we’re going to do is – we’ll put an explanation on the website here in the next week or so – we are going to offer people that come, we want to encourage people to come to our showroom here in Salt Lake. Even if they come for one day; we once had a couple fly in from Minnesota in the morning, I picked them up at the airport, brought them to the showroom, they sat on the chairs for a few hours, we bought them lunch, we took them to the airport and dropped them off, and they were off back to Minneapolis the same day.

And we will do that for you. So if you would like to come to our showroom here in Salt Lake City, we would love to have you. And we would like to encourage you to come by saying that if you don’t want to rent a car, I can pick you up at the airport – especially if it’s in the same day that you’re coming and leaving – pick you up at the airport, bring you to the showroom, we’ll buy you lunch or dinner depending on what time of day you’re coming, and I’ll drive you back to the airport so you get to your flight on time. And of course I’m always there as a resource to ask any questions about the chairs, and we have wonderful visits and I really like I’ve made some wonderful friends from these people who have come and spent the day with me.

In return, I will give you a $300 discount on chairs that are priced between $3500 and $5000, and I’ll give you a $500 discount for chairs over $5000 – well, it’s not even a discount, what I’m going to do is put $300 or $500 toward your travel expenses. So we’ll take that $300 or $500 out of the price of the chair, and that money is going to be going toward your travel expenses. So, hopefully, you can get here within that $300 to $500 price point with your flight or however it is that you’re going to get here, and then we will reimburse you that amount. And of course we’ll pick you up at the airport so you don’t have to spend any money on a rental car. If you’re staying the day, you don’t have to stay at a hotel; we can get you back to the airport and take care of everything and keep your trip at a very minimal cost.

But it is nice to be able to sit in these chairs, isn’t it? I mean, you read so much about them, look at them and you think, ‘That’s the chair I want.’ And in both cases over the last two weekends when I’ve had someone come – I had George come from San Jose and I had Steve come from Arizona this last Saturday – both of them ended up buying chairs completely different from the ones that they thought they were going to buy, the ones they were most interested in based on what they saw on the website and in their research. So it is important to be able to try out these chairs, and we want to make that available to you and that’s how we’re doing it. So we’ll talk more about that as the days go by, and that is the program that we’re working on.

So anyways, that’s it I guess for massage chair industry update for the week of March 26th, 2013. It was good to visit with you today. If you have any questions, feel free to give me a call at 801-651-2026, which is my cell number, or you can call us toll free at 888-259-5380. Also, please visit the website if you want more information, or check out our blog. And of course if you liked this video and you found it helpful, please ‘Like’ our YouTube video or subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can get more and more of these updates every time we come out with them. And please ‘Like’ us and share us on Facebook and Twitter, we appreciate that very much. So again, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ thanks for visiting and we’ll see you again in two more weeks. Bye bye.

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