Transcript of Video Titled “Massage Chair Industry Update – May 12, 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 Friday, May 12th, 2017.

[SCREEN TEXT: Stock Status]

Alan: We are in, well, as far as stock goes, I don’t really have anything to announce, that I’m aware of, nothing’s been sent to me as far as stock issues. I know that the Novo, some of the colors of the Novo are low, but apparently, they are all in stock. I think the Titan Executives are in stock. Those are the ones that we’ve had trouble with in the past, but I think everything’s pretty much in stock right now, and that doesn’t surprise me. It’s kind of the slowest time of the year, or maybe not the slowest, but around the slower time of the year, so they’re usually stocked up pretty good on inventory.

[SCREEN TEXT: Mother’s Day/Father’s Day Sales]

Alan: But anyway, we have our Mother’s Day sales. Mother’s Day, of course, is this weekend, and it’s too late to – well, actually, you know, it’s not too late – if you live in Southern California or Dallas, we can probably get a chair to you that same day, or maybe by this afternoon, but it’s pushing it, so but we also have Father’s Day coming up in June. And the sales that we have from the different companies, and I’ll go over those in just a moment, those sales will run until Father’s Day weekend. And those sales include: Ogawa has their sale, where they have $400 off the Refresh, $500 off the Ogawa Active SuperTrac, and $500 off the Smart 3D massage chair. That’s the chair that has the tablet, the Samsung tablet, that comes with the chair, that you can operate from the application, or the app on the tablet. Also, Luraco has $700 off on their iRobotics 7 chair. The Novo XT has, you can get a – when you buy the chair, and they ship the chair to you, and they’ve set it up – you get the serial number from that chair, go to a website, and we will share that website with you when you buy a chair, or when you receive your chair, and then you can go in there and apply for the $500 Visa gift card. So, you’re getting basically $500 cash back when you buy the Novo XT, and that chair is increasingly popular, even at the price point that I kind of balked at when it first came out, it seems to be a popular seller. I have kind of an opinion on some – well, I’ll talk about that as well, hopefully I’ll remember to do this, but it just reminded me of something that is – that I’m seeing more and more of in the market, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad, or what’s going on, but I’d like to chitchat a little bit about that at the tail end of this broadcast. Anyway, Infinity also offers their three-year parts-and-labor warranty, their full comprehensive coverage for three years, for free, with any of their chair purchases, and I think, is that it for sales? Well, we have other sales, like ones that I can’t advertise on the website, and I can’t announce here, but you can call the showroom, and ask. We have some other sales going on that’re kind of in-house sales, and we can pass those on with you, and some of them are in addition to the ones that we’re already getting, the ones that I’ve already announced to you.

[SCREEN TEXT: Condensed Novo XT Review]

Alan: OK, I wrote a condensed Novo XT – and I think, the Novo XT is that new chair I just talked to you about, from Human Touch – I wrote a review, it was about 2000 words, and I had a customer comment about, he said ‘Too long, not going to read it.’ And I thought ‘Geez, you know, what’s the deal?’ and then someone else told me that the, and looked at my – well, no, somebody that I use their service for, for my website placements on Google, they had mentioned that more and more people looking at my site are looking at my site through mobile devices, so cell phones, mostly, smartphones. Well, I guess a 2000-word article on a laptop, or a computer, it’s long, but it doesn’t look overwhelmingly long. Well, 2000 words on a smartphone, the little tiny pages go down, down, down, down, down, it’s a little excessive, and it can be a little buggy to try to read that. So, I wrote a condensed version, and this one’s about 500 words, so maybe on every review I do, because I am kind of verbose when it comes to reviews, because I express my feelings, and my opinions, and what my experience was of the chair, and so maybe what I’ll do is, every time I do write a review now, I will include a condensed version for our mobile-phone users, and of course, you know, anybody that just doesn’t want to read 2000 bloody words on my website.

[SCREEN TEXT: California Showroom Now Fixed – Like New!!]

Alan: OK, the California store, the good news is that we finally have our store done, and apparently, the carpet was put in last night, the new carpet. We had a tan-colored carpet that went with the blue walls. Now, the carpet, we had it changed to gray, so it matches the walls a little bit better, and it kind contrasts with a lot of the black chairs we have in the showroom. But all the damage has been done, not all the bills have been paid, and I don’t know what’s going to come out of the wash after the insurance is done. I have a feeling it’s not all – well, I know it’s not all covered – it’ll be interesting to see what we’ve got to pay out for that. But it’s nice to have the showroom done, and I’ll have Michael, my manager down there, maybe share some pictures on our Instagram social media account, or with me, and I’ll put it up on Facebook, or on the blog, or whatnot. But we do have some, that store is now back to the way it was, but maybe even better now.

[SCREEN TEXT: Download My Free Report from My Website to Get on Our Mailing List and Be Notified of Any and All Sales]

Alan: OK, so, oh, getting back to the sales, I just remembered, I usually will announce sales, any sales that we have, either the ones that are, like the ones that I’ve just announced, that the massage chair companies allow us to mention publicly, but we also have some in-store sales, as I mentioned, or in-house sales. And if you want to know what those are, and you’re not clear where to find out where those sales are, because they’re not on the website, just download my free report. If you go to the bottom of any page on my website, there’s an opportunity there to download my free report, which is ‘8 Things You Absolutely Need to Know Before You Even Consider Investing in a High Quality Robotic Massage Chair,’ and when you download that free report, you get put on our mailing list. Now, you can opt out of our mailing list, I understand if you don’t want to be mailed anything, but if you want to know what’s up and coming in the industry, and if you want to know what sales we’ve got cooking, well then, that would be the way to be notified, so just a little information for you.

[SCREEN TEXT: Cozzia Qi Massage Chair]

Alan: OK, I’ve heard about this chair, the Cozzia Qi, Q-I, the Qi. It’s a chair that’s fairly pricey, it’s about $10,000, and it’s a Chinese-made chair, but apparently, it has a scanning feature that is very unique, and I don’t know much about that chair, to be honest with you. I’ve seen it, I’ve never sat in it, I saw it at a trade show, and I just got permission from Cozzia to carry that chair. And we’re going to be putting – I’m waiting for a media packet, or an information packet from Cozzia, that gives me all the images, the pricing, I think it’s $9999, the colors, all the details that we like to put on our website – so it’s available on the product page on our website, and available on our comparison chart, but anyway, this chair’s an interesting chair. Cozzia and Ogawa are the same company, Cozzia is a big massage chair company that sells primarily through brick-and-mortar furniture stores. They are built in a company called East Pau in Xhao Ming, China, and their chairs are exclusively built there, I believe. Anyway, so there’s kind of a crossover between Ogawa and Cozzia, because of the similar chairs, it’s run by the same company, the warehouse handles both in Southern California, and their office, their main offices in Southern California, handle both Cozzia and Ogawa chairs. We only have three Cozzia models on our website, because that’s all they’ll allow us to sell. They’re three cheap models, I’ve never seen them, I’ve never sat in them, because I’m not allowed to have them in my showroom, because RC Wiley has a distribution – RC Wiley is a big furniture company out here in the West, and they have exclusive rights to have them in their showroom – and so I can’t even have the bloody thing in my showroom. Well, the Cozzia Qi, they’ve given me the OK to sell this chair, and I can sell it on our website, and we will probably have one in one of our showrooms, if not both of our showroom stores over time. But this was kind of what was leading to my – oh, by the way, as far as the Qi goes, it’s – let me me tell you, oh, for heaven’s sake, I hope I kept the notes. Anyway, the Qi is an interesting chair because there are some – oh, here it is – there are some caveats to it. There’s some things that a buyer probably needs to be aware of. Number one is it comes in one box, and it cannot be disassembled to make it fit through a doorway, less than 36 inches. So, if your doorways are more than 36 inches, that chair is probably not going to fit in your home, and I have to say, based on my experience in this industry, which has been about over 12 years, I have not seen very many homes that have a 36-inch doorway. As a matter of fact, a lot of businesses don’t have a 36-inch doorway. So, make sure, when you’re getting that chair, it comes in one box, it’s one piece, it’s 285 pounds, that chair will not get through a door frame smaller than 36 inches. And they mentioned to me that if you have like a curved staircase – first of all, if your staircase isn’t even 36 inches, good luck if you’re going up or down stairs – but if you have a curved staircase, a curved stairwell, it could be difficult to get that chair around, because again, it only comes in one piece, it’s a big piece, and it’s hard to fit through doors. So, it looks like it’s a very interesting chair, I’m interested to try it out and see how it feels. It supposedly has a very dynamic scanning feature, that changes as you change, as you use the chair, and your spine changes, you know, the muscle tendency changes, or whatever, that chair apparently adapts to that, with this scan. And I don’t know much about it, I don’t know if that’s a big deal, or if that’s just fluff, I don’t know, but we’re going to find out more about it, and we’ll get it up on the website, but I wanted you to know about that chair.

[SCREEN TEXT: My Thoughts on REALLY Expensive Chinese-Made Chairs]

Alan: Anyway, what I was going to mention, and I didn’t want to forget this, is that I’m seeing some chairs out there that are being priced – these are Chinese-made chairs being priced through the roof – I’ve seen some chairs as high as $17,000, list price. Now, list price, you can just throw that out the window. If you see a chair, like even on our website that says, you know, ‘Regularly $7000, on sale for $4000,’ you know, don’t, that’s nothing to get too excited about, that’s just the way that the importing company has priced the chair. It makes it seem like you’re getting a huge discount, I guess you are on paper, but really, the value of the chair is what the minimum advertised price is, and some would argue, it’s even less than that. But anyway, I’m seeing these chairs come out now, some of them are no-name brands, some of them are not no-name brand chairs, but not many of them, and they’re being priced higher than the Japanese-made chairs. Now, the Japanese chairs are known to be of a better quality, they last longer, a lot of the components are better-quality components, even though some of the components are made in China, or in other countries. But the Japanese chairs have always been the more expensive chairs, and now the American Luraco chair, but part of is because they’re made in a place that has higher, you know, higher costs of production, but also, there’s maybe more that goes in to the development of the chair, maybe greater quality control, a little bit more in the design-and-engineering phases. I don’t know what justifies all the costs, but typically, the Japanese chairs are more expensive, because China is a less expensive place to build. So, anyway, so these chairs that are advertised for $17,000, or $12,000, or even $10,000, with all due respect to the Cozzia Qi, which I haven’t tried out yet, these chairs are getting increasingly expensive. And it concerns me a bit, because even though the quality of the chairs in China are getting better, at least in the big manufacturing companies, like East Pao, or Wong Ty, or iComfort, just because of that, the costs are still relatively low. And when I hear of a chair selling for $12,000, or $10,000, and it’s a Chinese-made chair, it makes me nervous, because I think that, number one, they’re trying to artificially inflate the pricing to try to get them to be like on par with other, higher-priced chairs, when what’s really happening is they’re making a huge amount of profit, a huge amount of profit, and it just doesn’t make sense to me. Now, I could be up in the night about it, I was leery about the Novo XT from Human Touch, being priced at $7999, but there is an American component of designing and engineering, which makes it more expensive, and so they have their own engineers and designers that are involved it, and quality-control testing, etcetera, etcetera. Like, I’ve been to Human Touch’s place, you can see my video on YouTube, I went there a couple years ago, and did a recording of their research lab, and stuff was very similar to what Luraco has, you know, and anyway, there is a higher cost of quality control and quality testing. But some of these other chairs, they’re done all in China, and then they box up, and ship to America, and then people sell them for these exorbitant amounts of money, and that makes me a little nervous. I have a feeling that you’re getting jacked, I could be wrong, but I get the feeling that you’re maybe getting jacked a little bit. So, be leery when you see a chair being priced around $10,000, it’s just, I don’t know, I don’t know, it’s just, and maybe I’m just an old geezer, and maybe I’m not, you know, in to it, or I don’t totally understand what’s happening, but it makes me nervous. So, anyway, big, expensive chairs made in China, it’s kind of a little bit of a red flag to me. Now, the Cozzia Qi, I don’t know, maybe this is the beginning of something new, maybe this is the beginning of new trend, where chairs are going to be $10,000 or more, but you can still get excellent chairs for $3000, $3 to $4000, like really good chairs. I think it’s hard to find a really good feature-rich chair for, you know, for under $2500, or $2000. I think you’ll have to maybe get some, you know, you’ll have to compromise some of the feature set, or some of the bells and whistles, if you will, or even the quality of the roller system, but man, $3 to $4000, you can still get a great chair. So, anyway, that’s my opinion, you know, whether you agree with it or not, or whether it’s right or wrong, that’s my opinion, based on my experience, and what I’m seeing. So, if you have a question about a chair brand that maybe is advertising, and you see their name all over the Internet, but you’re seeing their chairs selling for $12,000, you know, feel free to give me a call if you have any questions about it, and I can give you my input. Sometimes I hear things, you know, through the grapevine, through other customers, who tell me about these chairs. And sometimes, the no-name brand chairs are just, really just that, no-name brands that are artificially being inflated, or made to seem very popular, when in fact, they still haven’t really got a strong track record, and maybe there is some price gouging, I don’t know, but it makes me a little nervous. Anyway, that’s enough of that.

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

Alan: So, I think that’s about it for this week. Geez, I hope you found this video helpful. If you did, you know, feel free to thumbs up ‘Like’ us on our YouTube channel. Of course, spread the word about massage chairs by sharing this video on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Twitter accounts, whatnot. We appreciate you helping us spread the word.

[SCREEN TEXT: 888-259-5380]

Alan: But if you have any questions, feel free to give me a call at 888-259-5380, I’m always available to chitchat about massage chairs. And of course, if you have any questions about the sales that are going on, or you want to place an order over the phone instead of on the Internet, just give us a call, we’ll take care of you. I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from ‘Massage-Chair-Relief.com,’ and I will see you again in two weeks. Bye bye.

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