Hi, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from Massage Chair Relief, and today is our bi-weekly massage chair industry update for Tuesday, November 21st, 2023. Thank you so much for watching and joining in. We have a big week ahead of us in the retail industry especially for massage chairs being the profession that I’m in. But Black Friday starts on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Of course, there have been sales that have already started to pour in pre-Black Friday sales since the beginning of … As a matter of fact, I think it’s even since the beginning of November and even before then. But the sales that we have for the most part are dictated to us by the distributors of the chairs that we sell.
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And so, those sales are now coming in fast and furious as well. I think I’ve mentioned them in a previous industry update. For example, the Kyota chairs are on sale, the Sharper Image AXIS 4D is on sale. Right now, there’s a sale on the Human Touch® Gravis Zero-G chair and the Cirque Zero-G chair from Human Touch®. Those are recliners with a massage feature. We have some other sales that are still coming that’ll be broadcast later this week. We can’t put them up, one company in particular, until the 24th. Let’s see, what else have we got?
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The Luraco is on sale right now for 1000 off on the Special Edition and 500 off on the regular i9 Max. The Ogawa has a discount on the Active L 3D, the Master Drive 2.0, the Master Drive LE, and the Ogawa Active XL. So, these are all sales that are going on right now. Now we also have some in-house sales, but we can’t advertise those on the website. Now, if you’d like to see our listing of all of our Black Friday sales, and I think we have about 40 of them right now total between the distributors and the ones that we have in-house, you have to download my free report and get on our mailing list.
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You can download the free report from the home page of our website. If you scroll down, you’ll see a place for signing in for that opt-in form. And then you will be on our mailing list to learn about the page on our website that has the sales, all the sales, not just the distributor sales, but our in-house sales as well. And there’s lots and lots of sales, so it’s a great time to buy. It’s a great time to get a massage chair. There are some new models that have come out recently, and I’m going to talk about one in just a moment that just came out this week. As a matter of fact, this was introduced to us on Monday, as a matter of fact; Monday or Friday of last week.
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Also, I should tell you, of course, that there are deadlines for shipping chairs, so you get them by the 25th or by the end of the year. And those particular deadlines are fast coming, fast and furious. So, I believe that December 1st is pretty much the consensus date for white glove delivery. And that’s bringing the chair into your home and setting it up. And then for curbside delivery, it depends on the company and it depends on where you live in the country. So, if your chair is shipping out of Southern California and you live in Florida or Massachusetts, for example, it’s going to take a little longer to get to you.
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So, you always want to plan on 7 to 10 business days for curbside delivery, but give it more time than that for guaranteed shipping. So, for curbside delivery, you definitely want to try to order your chair early in the month of December. Don’t wait until a week before the 25th or you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Also be aware that because of this period of the year, this time of the year, Black Friday through the end of the year, the chairs do sell, and it’s a very busy time for us, and models will be out of stock, colors of models will be out of stock. So, just be aware that you may not get exactly what you want the longer you wait.
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Again, if you want to know what the latest sales are, download our free report, and then you’ll be on our mailing list and you’ll learn about what the sales are, the complete array of sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So, Luraco introduced a new model called the Model 3 Hybrid. And it is the thin-down version of the Luraco i9 Max. Now, the i9 Max Special Edition is what we have in our showrooms. All these chairs have split track, but that’s the one that has a separate roller mechanism on the bottom track, and a separate roller mechanism on the top track.
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And for the special edition, it’s dual rollers on the top and four rollers on the bottom. Well, the new Model 3 Hybrid does have a split track, but it does not have a roller mechanism for each part of the track. It’s one quad roller mechanism, so one four-headed monster, if you will, that goes up and down the back to the neck and down under the seat for the massage, so you’re not getting the special edition version of the roller track. The chair has a slight appearance difference, not much, but it’s a little bit different looking than the i9 Max series. They don’t call it an I9 chair, it’s just a separate model.
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It does not have hand rollers, does not have calf rollers. It does not have the sliding side doors that the i9 Max series has. And thus, because it doesn’t have the sliding armrests, it does not have the distraction portion of the armrests as part of the stretch program, which is very unique to the i9 Max series. Also, it has heat in the low back and the feet, but no heat in the hands. It has a wireless controller, which Luraco never had a wireless controller on any of their chairs before. So, now they’ve got a wireless controller, and I don’t know exactly how the functionality is going to be of that.
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I haven’t seen a picture of the remote control. I don’t know if it’s the same setup of the remote control as the i9 Max series, which is like a smartphone. But we will get more and more pictures of that chair as we get the product up on the website, and we’ll be able to tell. And I think that’s just about it for the differences. There’s no personalization like in the i9 Max Special Edition. You don’t get personalization at all; that’s not an option. There’s no emergency backup power. There’s no custom keypad. So, it’s basically a trimmed-down version of the i9 Max with the differences that I’ve mentioned to you. And the price of that is 9,999.
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So what that does and what I think I see Luraco doing is they’re giving a made-in-USA chair option for less than ten grand, because all the i9 Max chairs up to now have been over $10,000. And so, for some that want an American chair, an American-made chair, but don’t want to pay over $10,000, this chair is the option for you. I don’t even know what our cost is on it yet. The warranty comes with three years labor, and five years parts, and you can get two additional years of labor for … I believe their list price is $890. Of course, we at Massage Chair Relief offer our industry best, industry-only, industry-exclusive lifetime labor warranty.
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So, if you buy the Luraco, any Luraco chair that has that three and five-year warranty, you will basically have the labor because if you’re buying the extended warranty, you’re paying for two extra years of labor to give you five years of parts and labor. So, when you have our lifetime labor warranty behind you, you’ve got that covered, so you don’t have to you don’t have to spend $890 for a couple of extra years of labor coverage. I told you Luraco has the sale, right? It just started on the 20th and it expires on the 27th. It’s $1,000 off the Special Edition, which is the chair model of theirs that we have in our showrooms at this point. And then $500 off the i9 Max regular; I just call it the regular, the standard edition.
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Our next live stream is going to be next week on, on Wednesday the 29th. And our guest w will be David Wood, who’s the CEO of Human Touch. And there will also be a couple of other folks from Human Touch® that will be on the live stream. But if you have questions for them and for their new models that are coming out, they have a Novo 2.0 and a Super Novo X, and I haven’t tried either of them. When I went and did the interview or the visit to their offices in Long Beach, Dale Sheppard was the guy. And I think Dale is going to be on the call. But Dale was going over the Whole-Body Rove and the whole-body 8.0 massage chairs. And they had the body frame of the X there, but it was not operable. It was still a prototype and it was not operational. They were still working on it in the factory.
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So, it’ll be interesting to see those chairs. I understand the Super Novo 2.0 is supposed to come out this month, and the X possibly next month, but most likely in the first quarter of next year. But we will talk about that with our guests on the livestream. So, if you want to see it, go to our YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/massagechairrelief, or our Facebook page, which is facebook.com/massage.chair.relief. And we are supposed to get it up on the home page of our website, but we still have not got that done yet. And I think that’s taking a little more time because of the formatting for the live stream as well as placeholders between the live stream events.
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So, that’ll be Wednesday, November 29th at 2:00 pm Eastern time, which is 11:00 am Pacific. And then, of course, the mountain in central, the two extra hour intervals between them. So, come on and join us and bring your questions with you and your comments. David is a very savvy guy about the industry. He’s a big-picture thinker and I like talking to him. Dale will be there to discuss the products, I’m sure. And then I think Cathy Lu is going to be their third guest. None of that is firmed up, but I do know that David will be there on the 29th at 2:00 pm Eastern time, so come and join us, we’d love to have you.
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And also, I do a drawing for my book. Everybody that attends the streaming can type into the comment section hashtag book and you’ll be entered into a drawing for my book, and we’ll send that to the winner after the stream is over. Now, also, it is a holiday season and people are buying chairs. They’re buying a lot of things. And guess this message I’m going to give you can apply to everybody regardless of what you’re purchasing. But listen, keep your boxes. When you buy a chair, especially if you’re buying it as a gift for someone else, keep your boxes and all your packaging material, because if you don’t want it or whoever you’re buying the chair for wants to return it. Keep your boxes.
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We have free exchanges and returns, so you will not have to pay for the return shipping, but you are going to be responsible for packing up your chair and having it ready to ship back. We will pay for the shipping, but you got to put that thing together, and that’s going to be a bit of a pain in the butt. But if you don’t keep the boxes and you have to ship the chair back, the cost of the chair shipping is going to be more. It’s going to be quite a bit more and you will have to pay a portion of that. Now, the only massage chair company that offers free return shipping and no restocking fees, no shipping, no restocking, no back billing for the original shipping.
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And it’s a 90-day term, which is, if not the best, among the best time return periods in the massage chair industry. So, just to protect you from the cost of extra shipping, because if you don’t buy from us, you will be more than likely paying for some return shipping. And if you don’t have the boxes, it’s going to cost. They’ll charge you more for it. So, just be aware of that. I put up a video recently that talked about our massage chair survey, which I discussed in a previous Industry Update. But if you want to watch that video, it’s a short video that talks about my survey of our customers and what their responses were in terms of what conditions they bought a massage chair for and if the chair actually did what they were hoping it would do by buying the chair for those conditions.
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And the conditions are not all pain syndromes. There are some that have to do with stress, with sleeping better, with increased flexibility, with relaxation. So, check out that video on YouTube if you want to see what the results were of that survey. It was quite interesting. And then also, I just wrote an article last week about new versus used versus refurbished massage chairs and the pros and cons of all of them. And the reason I did the article was because it’s a time of the year where people are asking about used chairs all the time because people want to get massage chairs, but they want to get a cheaper massage chair, cheaper than a deal you can get on a new chair.
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And so, I lay out some of the things that you need to be aware of when you’re buying a used chair. And probably first and foremost is, if the person that’s selling that chair privately to you … If it’s an authorized dealer like us or another authorized dealer, yeah, there will be warranty attached to that purchase of a pre-owned chair. But if you are buying privately through Facebook Marketplace or Offer Up or a neighbor or a friend or family or whatever, and they’re telling you that there’s warranty left on the chair, there is no warranty left for you, there is only warranty left for the original buyer.
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Warranties do not transfer, and I do not know of one company for whom we represent their massage chairs that has a transfer of warranty for private sale after the original person has purchased it. So, that’s just one thing of a number of things that I talk about, just to beware. Buyer beware man. That’s my mantra. Buyer beware. Anyway, I think that’s about it for the things that we have to talk about today. I just want to make sure that I’ve covered everything deadlines, the sales, the new models, keeping your boxes. And make sure you understand the return policy of the people you’re buying a chair from.
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Ours is pretty cut and dried. It’s 90 days from the day it ships to the day that we have to have the chair back to us. But you go on our website and it’s laid out point by point, our return policy, so you’re not ignorant at all and there’s no surprises. But on some of the other retailers out there, I’ve seen not all of them, but some of them, I’ve seen it very ambiguous. They’ll say you have a 30-day return policy. It doesn’t say what the cost will be. It doesn’t say how long or what the 30 days is. Is it from the day it ships, the day you order? It is the 30th day the day that it has to be back in your shop or do you have to call them by the 30th day?
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So, please be aware of what the return policy is for your chair purchase. And of course, you can always call us at 888-25905380 and we can give you the details of our own policy. But anyway, I’m Dr. Alan Weidner from Massage Chair Relief, thank you so much for joining me today and I look forward to seeing you on the next video in two weeks. Have a great day and a great Thanksgiving holiday.