Massage Chair Industry Update – February 27, 2018 (Video)

March 1, 2018
 By Allison Bricker
March 1, 2018
 By Allison Bricker

Massage Chair Industry Update – February 27, 2018 (Video)


Transcript of Video Titled “Massage Chair Industry Update – February 27, 2018”

[SCREEN TEXT: SUBSCRIBE to Our YouTube Channel and be Notified of Each New Massage Chair Video!]

Alan: Hi, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com’ and today is our biweekly massage chair industry update for, today is Tuesday, February 27th, 2018. Thank you for joining me. Well, let’s get right in to the business here.

[SCREEN TEXT: Luraco Legend Review]

Alan: I just recently wrote a review on the Luraco Legend. The Luraco Legend is the American-made L-track, it’s the only non-Chinese L-track chair out there, and it had been – it was announced – there was a prototype at the CES in 2017, January 2017. So, we waited all year for the chair to come out. It finally came out in December of 2017, so just a few months ago, and now we have it in both of our showrooms, and we’ve sold quite a number of them, and it is a good chair, and I finally wrote a review. A lot of people have asked me about a review, I wrote a review. If you’d like to see it, it’s on my blog, and it’s a pretty good, pretty, fairly comprehensive review. It’s about 1800 words, I think, and I know for some of the younger people, that’s a long article to read. But it goes in to pretty good detail as to how the chair feels, and it’s based on my experiences of it, of sitting on it, our experiences of having it in the showroom etcetera, but anyway, Luraco Legend is now, a review is up on my website, on my blog, or article library.

[SCREEN TEXT: uKnead Lohas Price Increase]

Alan: The price of the uKnead Lohas has gone up $300. It’s now $4595, with a $300 instant savings, brings it down to $4295. That’s a nice chair, you might want to take a look at that, if the Human Touch Novo XT, or some of those 3D L-track chairs are a little too much for you, but you like the look of the Human Touch Novo XT, you can get the uKnead Lohas, which is a 2D chair, which means the rollers go up and down and side to side, but they don’t go forward and back, which is what the 3D gives you.

[SCREEN TEXT: 3D vs. 4D???]

Alan: That’s the third dimension, forward and back, and by the way, if you ever see a chair that says it has 4D, there’s not a fourth dimension, at least that we deal with in our industry. There might be, in some kind of you know, Einstein class, they might talk about a fourth dimension of space, but here on Earth, with what we deal with day to day, there’s three dimensions, the X, Y, and Z axes. Anyway, if you find a chair that has 4D, what that means is that they’ve got the speed component involved, so you can adjust the speed of the rollers, that’s the fourth dimension, according to some of these massage chair marketers. Well, it’s all 3D. All the 3D chairs have speed adjustments, so for the most part, every chair that is a 3D is a 4D, but anyway, that’s just me on a soap box. Anyway, the uKnead chair, that Lohas, is a nice – it’s a lookalike, kind of a little pod – it’s a smaller chair than the Novo XT, but it’s a nice chair, it’s got a lot of kick to it. It’s got calf rollers, which not a lot of chairs have.

[SCREEN TEXT: Calf Rollers in the Osaki Ekon]

Alan: By the way, the new Osaki Ekon has calf rollers as well. The calf rollers that you’ll find on the uKnead chairs is a circular disc that rotates behind the gastrocnemius muscle, which is your big calf muscle, and the Apex Ultra also has a disc-like roller. This one, on the Ekon, is more of a like a central roller, like what you have in the feet. So, we have that chair in our California showroom, we are getting it in our Utah showroom in the next few days, and I’ll write a review on that chair as well. That’s a nice chair, made in the Rongtai factory, which is a very, very good factory, anyway, in China. Anyway, I just thought I’d let you know that the Lohas chair price has gone up.

[SCREEN TEXT: How Hot Does Chair Heat Get?]

Alan: Also, oh, I got an interesting email from – one of my customers had asked what the temperature of the heat was on the Luraco iRobotics 7 – and you know, I’ve never been asked that before, as far as what is the actual temperature of the heat, and I don’t think there’s any company out there that has actually given me any information regarding the degree of heat that the chair will, you know, create. And anyway, someone asked Luraco, and Luraco answered, and they cc’d me on it, and they said that the back gets to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the feet get to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and the seat gets to 96 degrees Fahrenheit, so there you go. Who knew that they were measuring the actual temperature of the heating pads in this chair, or in any chair, for that matter?

[SCREEN TEXT: Is a Massage Chair a Tax-Deductible Expense?]

Alan: But I thought I might pass that on to you as well, and another thing I want to pass along to you: I got this email from a customer of mine that had found a resource in Intuit. Intuit is the company that does TurboTax, and Quicken, and QuickBooks, and all that sort of thing, so it’s a reputable company, a very reputable company. Anyway, they kind of have a FAQ area, or you know, a chat board, where people can ask questions and get answers, and this is the question that was asked: ‘My wife is disabled, and she has a script, or a prescription, for massages. Instead of going to a massage, to get a massage, can I deduct purchasing a massage chair?’ I get this question all the time, and especially, you know, now it’s tax time, so this is a good time to be aware of what you can deduct and what you can’t deduct. Well, this was the answer: ‘If your doctor prescribed massages for your wife, you have the right to claim the chair as a medical expense on your federal tax return, as long as she is the one using it.’ Well, I get people all the time that ask me about chairs being tax deductible, and yes, I’ve told them that if you get a prescription, yeah, it can be a tax deduction. If you buy it for your staff, as a staff incentive, or for customers, as a customer, you know, a customer event, or a customer appreciation event, or something like that, you can write these off as tax-deductible expenses. Now, for businesses, that makes more sense because it’s a business expense, but for your home, if you have a prescription from a doctor – and I’m a chiropractor, but don’t ask me for a prescription, because that A). I’m not a practicing chiropractor any more, and B). That’d be a conflict of interest, oh yes, prescriptions for everyone from Dr. Weidner, the owner of ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ no, that wouldn’t be cool – but you can get prescriptions from your doctor and chiropractor for massage chairs, and thus, if they deem it necessary, then you can get that as a write off, as a tax write-off. OK, that’s good information for this time of year.

[SCREEN TEXT: “My Chair Finder” Update Coming!]

Alan: Also, we’re making some changes to the ‘My Chair Finder’ software. This is a little bit more difficult than I thought it would be, when we first created the ‘My Chair Finder.’ First of all, My Chair Finder is a software I created that allows you to go in and check off the brands that you might be interested in, the features in the chairs that you might be interested in, and the pricing that you’re, your budget pricing, and then it would pop up all the chairs that fall under those categories, all the things that you checked off in the categories. Well, we’re adding symptoms now, and this is quite a bit more complicated than I thought, but like if you have, just as an example, if you have sciatica, you know, or butt pain, or something like that, an L-track would be a chair that could address that issue, so all of the L-track chairs should come up. If you have a trap problem, like you want a massage on the trapezius, you know, the DreamWave, or the Panasonic MA73, and the MA70, and the Infinity 8500, and 8500X3 should come up, because those chairs do hit the traps pretty good. What about if you have shoulder pain, at the top of the shoulder blades, which is a common area for people, you know, when people are going like this, and massaging their shoulders, that’s called the levator scapula muscle, well, what if you have problems with that muscle, either tightness or pain, what chairs would address that, and there’s quite a few that do that. Anyway, I think this is a fantastic category that we’re adding to My Chair Finder. It’s not ready yet, it’s set up in the system, I just have to go in and go through all 50 odd chairs, and select those features that, or those, select those symptoms for that chair, that that chair would have accommodated. Like for example, all the chairs will do a neck massage, and a mid back, and a low-back massage, so all of them can fall in to that category, but sometimes you get one that’s like maybe, hand, what about the hand? Well, some chairs don’t massage the hands, they massage up to the wrists maybe, or they don’t have any hand or arm massage at all. Well, then, those ones would not come up in your search criteria. So, anyway, we’re working on that. I’m kind of excited about it, and we’re making this more and more user friendly. One thing that we’re having trouble – that I’d like to be able to add to – is the height recommendations. The problem with that is all the literature on every chair says our chair will handle, you know, 4 or 5′ up to 6′ 4″, or 6′ 3″. Well, you may fit in a chair that can handle that height, but that chair may not at all get your neck massaged. The classic example I think of is the Osaki 4S Japan, which is a great chair, but it says it’ll handle people up to 6′ 3″, I think. Well, my store manager in California is 5′ 7″, and it barely massaged to the top of his neck, so someone that’s 6′ 3″ actually fits in the chair, but will they get a neck massage? So, that’s the question, and so unless I go in to every single chair, and get someone that’s 6′ 3″ or 6′ 2″ or 6′ 4″, or whatever they say is their limit to sit in it, and measure it, and see if it actually hits their neck – oh, and here’s the other thing – some people might be 6′ tall, but have a torso for 6′ 2″, and so they’ll sit in a chair that says that it’ll fit 6′, but they’ll get in to it and it won’t hit their neck, because their torso is an extra long torso. There’s other people that have shorter legs, longer torso, other people that have shorter torsos, longer legs, so there might be a person that’s 6′ 2″ that could fit in a chair that’s supposed to fit only 6′, because their torso is shorter, and their legs are longer. I hope that makes sense. Well, how do you know that, until you get people that are all those different sizes, and all those different proportions of height, of body breakdown, to fit in those chairs, how am I going to know that for sure? So, that’s a tough one, and if I say yes – if I say in My Chair Finder that we – that this chair, the Osaki 4S Japan, will fit someone that is 6′ 4″ or 6′ 3″, people are going to be disappointed, and so that one is going to be a real tough one to integrate in to the My Chair Finder software, unless I have a lot of, you know, caveats, or you know, asterisks with explanations that this may not be, this may not adjust to massage your neck, and that would be the great big caveat, it may not massage your neck, even though the specs say it can handle someone tall. Anyway, I’m just kind of excited about the My Chair Finder software. We’re developing it more and more, and we should have that up within the next week. Anyway, OK, also, let’s see, what else is cooking? You know, that’s pretty much it for this week.

[SCREEN TEXT: My Recent Visit to Las Vegas]

Alan: I’ll close by saying that I went to Las Vegas this last weekend, with my son, on a hockey tournament, and I play hockey still, and I’m 58 years old, I probably shouldn’t be playing hockey for a couple reasons. Number one, I’m old, and number two, I can’t keep up with the 20-year-olds. They just, I mean, I need glasses to keep an eye on them, to know where they are because they move so fast, but my son signed us up in a tournament in Vegas, and we went down to play. Well, of course, when I travel somewhere, I usually try to visit a competitor, or visit someone that’s in the business, and I had a couple of great visits. I went and visited ‘Massage Chair Planet,’ which is a competitor of ours in Las Vegas. I had a wonderful visit with Richard, who’s the guy that runs the massage chair end of their business. It’s called ‘Bed Planet,’ and they had also other furniture, like sofas, and whatnot, but they do have some massage chairs there, and I had a wonderful visit with Richard. It was great to connect with someone else in the industry, and I had a nice visit there, and then I went and visited ‘Furniture for Life,’ which is the first licensee store for Furniture for Life, and Furniture for Life, if you’ll recall from previous broadcasts, is the umbrella company for Inada USA, Panasonic USA, Positive Posture, Valleyere, and yeah, those ones, those four companies, and now they’ve got beds called Techno Gel, beds and pillows. So, those are the products, all under the umbrella of this company called Furniture for Life, which is my friend Cliff Levin’s brainchild, and Cliff is the president of Inada USA, as you probably know. But anyway, we went to the store, it was in Las Vegas, not far from the hotel we were staying at on The Strip, and I visited with Marcus and Janet Lee, who are co-owners of the business, and had a wonderful visit with them. I just really had a good time, and got to know them, and saw the store, which is a very nice store, very, you know, contemporary, right in the heart of the Chinatown in Las Vegas. Anyway, I had a great visit with both of them, and you know, shout out to both Richard at Massage Chair Planet, and Marcus and Janet at Furniture for Life. I had a wonderful time. Thank you for being so hospitable and so kind. Massage Chair Planet had some chairs that I didn’t have in my showroom yet, like the Jupiter, and there was a Cozzia chair there that I’d never sat in before, and so it was really nice. Richard was very kind to let me sit in them, and very gracious, so thanks to everybody for your kindness when I visited Las Vegas this last weekend. And of course, I went to have the buffet, I don’t go to Vegas for shows, I don’t go to gamble since I can do that on my mobile on sites like www.casinoreviews.net.nz/leovegas, I go for hockey, or for buffets, I just love buffets, and I have a bottomless pit for a stomach, and needless to say, Vegas fits that bill for me. It fits a lot of bottomless pits, whether it’s food, or gambling, or whatever, but anyway, I had a great time in Las Vegas, and I had a great time visiting my competitors, if you will, wonderful time.

[SCREEN TEXT: 888-259-5380]

Alan: Well, anyway, I guess that’s about it for the update this week. If you have any questions, of course, feel free to email me, or reach out to me through the YouTube channel, or through Facebook, or through our chat software, or our phone number. By the way, our phone number is 888-259-5380, you can call any time.

[SCREEN TEXT: Please “Thumbs Up” Like This Video!!]

Alan: And of course, if you found this video helpful, please feel free to thumbs up ‘Like’ us on our YouTube channel, and of course, share this video with your friends and family through your you know, Google Plus, or LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Facebook, or whatnot, or Instagram now to help spread the word about massage chairs. Well, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ and I will see you again in two weeks. Bye bye.

Click on the following link to watch this Massage Chair Industry Update on our YouTube channel.

11 Things You Absolutely Need

DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY! GET MY FREE REPORT.

11 Things You Absolutely Need to Know Before You Even Consider Investing in a High Quality, Robotic Massage Chair
DOWNLOAD NOW
Massage Chair Relief BBB Business Review
Shopper Award
Since 2005, Massage Chair Relief has been selling the highest quality massage chairs for home and business use. We offer a wide selection of chairs and information to help you choose the brand and model that is right for you
© 2023 Massage Chair Relief. All Rights Reserved
magnifiercross