Transcript of Video Titled “Massage Chair Industry Update – January 9, 2017”
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Alan: Hi, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com’ and today is our biweekly massage chair industry update for Tuesday, January 9th, 2017. We have quite a few things to go over today, especially from the Consumer Electronics Show, which I attended last week, but let’s start off with stock status.
[SCREEN TEXT: Stock Status]
Alan: Back-ordered right now are the Titan Executive in all colors except ‘Beige.’ That chair will be in the end of February, beginning of March. The Panasonic MA73s in ‘Brown’ and in ‘Black’ are back-ordered until the end of this month, and the Ogawa Smart 3D in ‘Black’ is back-ordered until, I think, the beginning or middle of February. So, those chairs, not so much right now, but everything else seems to be in pretty good stock, as far as I’m aware anyway.
[SCREEN TEXT: Pre-Owned Massage Chairs for Sale]
Alan: We have our Used Chair Directory, and now as you probably know already, or may not know, but the Christmas holiday season is our busiest time of the year, so we sell a lot of chairs. Well, we have a certain percentage of returns every time – there’s a certain percentage of chairs that get returned – the more chairs we sell, the more returns we get. So, we will have any returned chairs that we have come back to us, we will put up on our pre-owned chair directory, which is on website. You can see it across the top of any of pages on our website, and you can go in there and see what we’ve got cooking. Right now, I’ve got a ‘Black’ iRobotics 7 from Luraco, which is regularly $8490. It’s our top-selling high-end chair. That chair is available for $6990, and again, it’s only one month old, great chair, and that includes shipping. We also have a ‘Brown’ Osaki Pro Maxim. The Pro Maxim was our top-selling chair during the holiday season, and we have one in ‘Brown’ that also comes with a two-year extended warranty, and that chair usually sells for $3295 without the warranty. With the extended warranty, we’re selling that chair for $2695, and again, it’s only a month old, so good deals all around for everybody.
[SCREEN TEXT: Make-A-Wish Foundation Fundraising Update]
Alan: Make-A-Wish Foundation, as you know, or again, may or may not know, I donate a portion of every chair sale to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and you can see – you can go on our website and see the Make-A-Wish Foundation link – and you can see where we’re at, as far as our donations go. At the end of December, we were at $32,575, and I’m very, very happy about that. Our goal is to get to $100,000. I have seen firsthand the benefits of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and granting wishes to kids with terminal illnesses, or life-threatening illnesses, and it is one of the most moving and wonderful things I’ve ever been a part of. So, thank you for those of you who purchased from me, because a portion of your chair sale went to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and thank you for those of you who donated money without even buying a chair, but just donated money out of the goodness of your heart, thank you kindly for being proactive enough to do that. I appreciate that very, very much, and if you’d like to donate, and you don’t want to buy a chair from me, just go on our website to our Make-A-Wish page, and you can donate there, any amount, any amount is appreciated.
[SCREEN TEXT: Ogawa Sale Still On!!]
Alan: Also, as far as the Christmas sales go, they’re all over now, except for the Ogawa sale. They are extending their $1000 off on the Smart 3D, $500 off on the Active, and $400 off on the Ogawa Refresh, until February 1st, so you can take advantage of those sales. Of course, because they’re out of stock on the ‘Black’ Ogawa Smart 3D, you can still order it though, if you order it ahead of – if you order it before the expiry date of the promotion, you’ll still get the chairs when they come in at the – you’ll still get the discounted price, but you got order it before February 1st.
[SCREEN TEXT: Consumer Electronics Show – CES]
Alan: OK, what else have got cooking? OK, so anyway, let’s get on to CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show. I’ve never been there before, and I got to tell you, it was overwhelming. It’s a huge event, like the directory for the eventers is as thick as a small phone book, and there’s 160,000 people there per day, and it was just immense. It was overwhelming, that’s the only word I can use to describe it, and of course, fortunately, I was just going there to see my eventers. I saw the Human Touch booth, I saw Infinity, they had two booths there, I saw Inada had two booths there, I saw Luraco had a booth, and uKnead had a booth, and three of those companies introduced new models. Infinity introduced a new model called the Altera right before Christmas, but that chair was not at the show, so that chair is not, I didn’t get a chance to sit on that chair. We’ll add it to the website soon enough, I just haven’t had time over the holidays, because it was so busy.
[SCREEN TEXT: New uKnead Lohas Model]
Alan: But I saw the new uKnead Lohas chair, which is kind of an upgrade from the Lavita. The Lavita is one of our top-selling L-track chairs, and the Lohas is an L-track chair also, but it also has calf rollers, but it has Bluetooth speakers, and it has a more modern, sleek exterior body, very similar to the Novo XT design. And that chair is going to be selling for a couple hundred bucks more than the Lavita is, so I assume it’s going to be $3895, because we sell the Lavita for $3695. Oh, and the airbags in the legs fold up, from the calves, they fold up, and they can massage the knees, and so that’s kind of cool, and I had a lovely visit with Nina and John, they’re the owners of uKnead. You know, and speaking of talking to the principals of companies, boy, oh boy, you know, I met most of the principals for these companies over this weekend, and it just reminded me of how wonderful these people are. Like, they’re good people, they’re not fly-by-nighters, they’re not people that are trying to rip people off, or take their money, and leave them high and dry if something goes wrong with a chair. These are good companies, run by good people, who definitely mean well and want to provide a wonderful service and a wonderful product. So, anyway, it was refreshing to meet all these good people, and had a wonderful time talking to them, and I feel very, very grateful to be associated with them in my business, they’re just wonderful, wonderful people.
[SCREEN TEXT: New Luraco Legend Model – 58″ L-Track!!]
Alan: Anyway, so then I went to Luraco, and I saw their new Legend, and they actually had two models out, new models out. I didn’t even pay any attention to the other one, it’s a smaller theater-room-type chair. Just from a glimpse, I saw that it didn’t have foot massage, I don’t know if it even had arm airbags, but it’s just a very basic, another, again, American-Taiwanese-made chair, like the iRobotics 7, but I’ll learn more about that when I go visit them, either this quarter, or the beginning of next quarter, to see that chair, and see the other chair up close. The other chair I’m talking about is the Legend. This is the chair that I’d heard rumors of was coming out. It’s an L-track, it’s a 3D L-track, with a 58-inch roller track, that’s phenomenal. The longest roller track before that, I think, was 51 inches, and I can’t remember even who had that, maybe that was the Iyashi from Infinity. I can’t remember, but this chair has a 58-inch roller track, and it’s a 3D-roller track, which means you can adjust the intensity of the rollers, but the intensity adjustment of the neck is independent of the mid back, of the low back, of the butt. So, you can adjust each area separately, so on a typical 3D-chair, if you increase the intensity of the rollers, it increases it throughout all areas of the spine. Well, if it’s already too intense in the low back, but not intense enough in the neck, and you increase the intensity, it’s going to be even more intense in the low back, and just right in the neck. Well, this chair has the ability to adjust the neck separate from the mid back, separate from the low back, separate from the buttock, and that is a pretty cool feature. So, you can really accommodate and customize the depth of the rollers for your comfort, in all areas of your spine, but the 58 inches, that’s surprising, and that chair has quad rollers. The Luraco iRobotics 7 has two rollers, dual rollers, this one has quad rollers, and the lowest part of rollers actually hit the belly of my hamstring. I was kind of surprised when it went down that low, and that’s the only chair I’m aware of that actually went that low, and at 58 inches, duh, but that 58 inches is also, not just in the low back, but also in the neck. The chair went up, the rollers went up, quite up high on my skull as well, so it can handle well over 6′, and it can handle the hamstring of the thigh, which I thought was fantastic, and that chair also has foot rollers, and a cool remote. The remote on the iRobotics 7, if you remember, is like a cell phone, like the – not a cell phone, like a new smartphone, with icons, which represent the programs – very easy to use. This chair has a small remote, and it kind of reminded me of an iPod, but again, very easy to use, with icons to push to get the programs working, very quick, it was a very fast remote. The programs switched from one to the other very quick, quicker than what I recall the iRobotics 7 doing, but that chair is not as sophisticated, or as feature rich as the iRobotics 7, but it’s a great chair for the price point, and the price point is $6499. It’s the first non-Chinese L-track chair that we’ve seen, so we’re excited to have that chair come to market. It will not be in market until July, maybe later, but they said the summer, and that could be anywhere from July to September, for all I know, and that’s, of course, assuming that there’s no problems with programming, like they had – it took a while for the iRobotics 7 to come to market – they had said that, that chair would come out July of that year, the year that it came out, but it didn’t for a few more months after that, because they were getting the programming tweaked just right. But this is a nice chair, the looks kind of reminded me of the iRobotics 7, the stitching, the colors, even the body frame seemed a little similar, foot rollers, 58-inch roller track, 3D L-track, yeah, nice chair, great remote, anyway, nice chair, good chair. I don’t have a picture of it with me, but I will show it to you on the blog, or on our YouTube channel when I have more information about it.
[SCREEN TEXT: New Inada Nest Model]
Alan: And then finally, Inada came out with a new model called the Nest, and the Inada Nest – there’s a picture of it – that chair looks an awful lot like the Flex 3s, and it’s priced at $5999, and what makes this chair unique is that it has one of the more intense massages of the Inada line. As a matter of fact, of the three models they carry right now, it is the most intense that I’ve ever felt, and it’s got good intensity, and one thing that really is interesting about this chair is it has rollers that are not smooth round rollers, like every other chair. It has this ridged, or ribbed roller, and someone described it as like a pumpkin, like a pumpkin, or a flower, and that adds a little different dynamic to the massage of the back, and I felt that one hit the top of my shoulder blades, on the levator scapulae muscles. Boy, it really dug in, like it dug in, and it felt different, and so it’s not going to be remarkably different, but boy, it’ll definitely be different. And the other thing that this chair has, it has a left, and a right roller, independent of each other, so it’s a quad roller, two and two, but the left and right move independently of each other, which is fascinating. I’ve never seen that in a chair before, and it also has airbags that go up and down the arms, upper arm down to lower arms, and it’s a sequential air cell inflation, so it goes up and down, up and down. It has shoulder airbags that pin the shoulders back, just like the Flex 3s did, to give you the stretch. It has airbags that wrap around the calves, and at the front of the calves, it’s got knobules that, when the airbags compress, it pushes those knobules in to the anterior tibialis muscles, which are the muscles just on the outside of your shin bone, and that allows for massage of that muscle, and that muscle can get quite tender for people that are on their feet a lot, or do a lot of running. As a matter of fact, I think that’s kind of what shin splints are all about. Let’s see, I think that is just about it. They call the roller the ‘3D LR Differential Massage,’ and so it allows the left and right sides of the rollers to work independent of each other to cater to different types of spines. And in my mind’s eye, I can see this working for someone like, someone that has a scoliosis, or maybe, on the one side of the curve, it’s really tight, on the other side, it’s not. So, maybe the rollers have to give a little bit on one side, and not on the other, and dig in a little bit more on the other, and then these are 3D, so you can adjust the depth of the rollers anyway. So, that’s kind of a cool chair, and that chair, I suspect will be out fairly soon. They had quite a few at the show, and that chair, again, I think I’d mentioned, is priced at $5999. OK, that is it for that.
[SCREEN TEXT: Novo XT Coming to Utah Showroom This Week!]
Alan: And I also visited the Human Touch booth. They had the Novo, and the Novo XT. The Novo XT is another 3D L-track. Those are the only two L-tracks that are 3D that we have, that one, and now the new Legend, which will not be out until summer. And the Novo XT, I’ve got one coming to my showroom this week, so we should have that chair in our Utah showroom this week, and we’ll be able to take videos, and kind of become more familiar with it, but that is a nice chair as well.
[SCREEN TEXT: 888-259-5380]
Alan: And I think that is just about it for everything this week. If you have any questions, you know, feel free to give me a call at 888-259-5380. I’m always available, and if I’m not, one of my associates at the California store is. We’d love to answer your questions, and help you make the right choice about the right massage chair for you.
[SCREEN TEXT: Please ‘Thumbs Up’ Like This Video!!]
Alan: Now, if you found this video helpful, please feel free to thumbs up ‘Like’ us on our YouTube channel, and of course, spread the word about massage chairs by sharing this video on your social media platforms, whether it’s Google Plus, or LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Facebook, or whatnot. We appreciate you helping us spread the word about massage chairs. Well, I’m Dr. Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ and I will see you again in two weeks. Bye bye.
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