Some news recently that you might want to know about:
- Furniture For Life (FFL) is now the USA distributor for Panasonic massage chairs. FFL is the mother company for Inada and their collateral companies. Panasonic’s customer support will still take care of any chair problems under warranty for the first year of this relationship and, after that, FFL will take care of the warranty work for the Panasonic chairs. From what I understand the 3 year parts and labor + 2 additional years of parts only coverage warranty will remain the same.
I like this change for two reasons: 1.) The folks at FFL are the same folks who handle all the Inada orders. These orders will be processed promptly and efficiently. I think it’s pretty spot on to say that Panasonic order processing was cumbersome and slow, at best, when Panasonic took care of it, and 2.) Previously, Panasonic did not have an in-home repair warranty. Panasonic chairs had to be repaired by Panasonic Authorized Service Centers. If you didn’t have an Authorized Service Center near you…tough beans! We sell a fair amount of the Panasonic MA73 massage chair and this became somewhat frustrating. Now, the same folks who take care of Inada chairs will also take care of the Panasonic chairs. Both of these reasons will add up to one thing – better customer experience! Chairs will ship out/deliver quicker and repairs can be done in home. I think this is a great move by Panasonic and I think the Inada folks are a fantastic choice to manage it. - Human Touch is following on the heels of their Novo XT deployment with a new
ZeroG model…the ZeroG 3.0 massage chair. After having introduced the newer, more sophisticated ZeroG 5.0, they had recently discontinued the ZeroG 2.0 and 4.0, which had an older body style. The ZeroG 3.0 fits that void. It looks like the 5.0 but with a few less features, like the 3.0 does not have the warm air heat feature, has 3 vs. 4 auto programs, and does not have the Body Map Pro feature for manual massage settings. If you are looking for a well priced, smaller massage chair with a quality build, the ZeroG chairs are perfect.
- Inada increased the price of their DreamWave to $8999. That change happened on April 1st of this
year, but we didn’t learn about it until a couple of weeks ago. I’m a little surprised that it’s price has jumped yet again, but if it continues to sell…more power to them!
- We had a flooding incident 4 weeks ago in our Southern California showroom and we had to shut it down for 3 weeks to dry out and make some repairs. We opened back up last week, but the carpet still hasn’t been replaced and the walls haven’t been repaired yet. However, at least you can go to the showroom now and try out chairs. I am very sorry for this inconvenience; I know many folks dropped by when it was closed and left without being able to try out our chairs.
- Johnson Wellness massage chairs are now back on the market under the Johnson Wellness name. If you recall, we used to carry their chairs and even had one in my Utah showroom. However, shortly after that, we were notified that we couldn’t have their chairs on our website anymore and they began selling their chairs under the Human Touch, Osaki, and Fujita brand names. That went on for 1-2 years but has since stopped. They are going back to distributing their chairs under their own name again and we will most likely begin carrying them again within the next few weeks. I’ll keep you posted!Dr. Alan WeidnerP.S. Give us a “Like”, “Share”, or “+1” and leave me a comment or question below to share what you learned or ask any questions, so other folks can benefit from this material.