Massage Chair Industry Update – 4/5/24
Hi, I’m Doctor Alan Weidner from Massage Chair Relief, and today is our bi-weekly Massage Chair Industry Update for Friday, April 5th, 2024. Thank you so much for joining me. It’s hard to believe that the first quarter of 2024 has come and gone already. We were notified a few weeks ago that the Super Novo X would be out the last week of March or the first week of April. And I haven’t heard anything about it. So for those of you who are waiting to learn more about that chair, we’re still waiting. So stay tuned to my newsletter. If you want to download my newsletter, go to my website and scroll down to the free report that you can download.
[00:00:56]
When you do that, you automatically get added to the email list for my newsletter. So, I mentioned last time that I went to Southern California to see the Fujiiryoki chairs. And we had Nicholas Beese on who’s the VP of Fujiiryoki. Again, Fujiiryoki and SYNCA-Wellness are part of the same company, but now they’re consolidating the company name to Fujiiryoki. Nicholas talked about the corporate structure of that company in conjunction with all the other subsidiaries of Johnson Health Tech, which is the parent company. He spoke about the new chairs. I think they’ve got six models coming out. Some of them will start in May.
[00:01:52]
We anticipate getting the D.Core II in. And so, we’re bringing back D.Core to our website. I’m very happy about that. I’ve always liked the D.Core chair. It’s a good-looking chair for a massage chair. And the ones they’re selling now are made 100% in Japan which is even better. And so, we’re full steam ahead with the Fujiiryoki chairs. We haven’t added them to our website yet. We will as soon as we know they are available to do so and when they have all the images, feature sets, and all that stuff that goes along with them. Also, we are proceeding with signing a dealer agreement with Bodyfriend to become an independent retailer for their chairs.
[00:02:36]
And I believe on the website, we will have the Leonardo. They call it the Leonardo DV for DaVinci, which is their high-end chair. A very nice-looking chair. It only comes in one color. And then, we’re also going to have the Phantom Robo, which is the chair, one of the chairs that has the independent foot massagers that incline and decline independently of each other as well as together. We will have one or both of those in our showrooms. But we’re still in the process of negotiating our agreement with them. Oh, speaking of live stream you, I talked about Nicholas being part of our last live stream, which was very informative.
[00:03:27]
If you haven’t had a chance to look at it, go to our YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/massagechairrelief, and watch that one. It’s a good one. It’s. And Nicholas is full of information about the industry. He’s particularly excited about the new direction they’re taking right now with the Fujiiryoki and the SYNCA chairs together and with at least three of the models being built in Japan. But our next live stream will be April 25th at 2:00 pm Mountain time, which is 4:00 pm Eastern, 1:00 pm Pacific Time. Our guest will be Michael Kogure, the president of USJaclean, which is the US distributor for Daiwa Chairs.
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And Michael is a very nice man. He’s been in the business here in the United States for well over 40 years. His chairs are built in the Rotai factory, which is a very, very good factory. I’ve actually been to that factory. If you want to go to our Massage Chair Relief YouTube channel, you can see that video. But Michael, who is from Japan, his first language, of course, is not English. He communicates well in English, but I believe his daughter is going to be on the call, too, on the live stream, and she will translate those things that are hard for him to express.
[00:04:52]
Or if we ask questions of him, she’ll be able to translate if some of those answers aren’t or some of those questions aren’t clear. I really like Michael. He is a very, very nice man. I met with him a couple of weeks ago when I was in Southern California trying out the new Pegasus the Daiwa Pegasus hybrid. We had lunch together and had a wonderful visit. He is a very, very kind and good man. Anyway, he will be our guest. I’ve been wanting to have him do something with me in terms of an interview or anything for quite some time. And he’s been always averse to that.
[00:05:29]
Well, I got a call from one of the people in their company who said he’d like to do that. He’d like to go on to do the live broadcast with us. So I’m very excited about that. Anyway, I’ll let you know more about that in our newsletter. Let’s see, it’s the 25th. I think we still have two weeks for our next industry update, so I’ll be able to nail it down then for you. So, Ogawa announced this last week that they are going to be discontinuing some of the colors of some of their chairs. So, for the Ogawa refresh, they’re discontinuing the taupe color for the Ogawa Active L 3D.
[00:06:11]
They’re discontinuing the green/cappuccino color. And for the active L 3D, they’re discontinuing the coffee and black color and the platinum gray color. So obviously they’re just. Well, there are a couple of reasons I think these things could be discontinued. Number one is the cost of the upholstery for those colors is too much. And so, they’re discontinuing for that purpose or they’re not popular selling models. I know they’re popular selling models, but they’re not popular selling colors, so they discontinue them. And so, that is something that we have going on right now or that’s happening recently.
[00:06:45]
We just learned about it this week. Also, they’ve extended their March sale till April 30th. I’m not going to go through all the sale prices. I’ll get mixed up along the way because I think it’s 5 or 6 models. And then the Svago chairs also, which are from the same company. Those are the Zero Gravity chairs that don’t have rollers and all that other kind of mechanism. They have roller massage mechanisms. They have airbags in the lumbar spine primarily. They are very comfortable. I actually have one of their chairs in my bedroom. I got it for my wife after a surgery she had so it could help her recover.
[00:07:20]
And of course, I’m the one that sits in it all the time. Isn’t that how it is? I think I mentioned this many moons ago in one of my broadcasts. When you buy your wife a CD set of LED Zeppelin CDs, you know and she knows that they’re not for her. They’re a gift for her, but it’s the husband who ends up listening to it all the time. No disrespect to the woman out there who loved LED Zeppelin. Who wouldn’t? Anyway, I went way off track on that one. And one thing I wanted to talk about is another experience we had. It was just over a week ago that someone came into our showroom, checked out some chairs, and then went online to do some further shopping.
[00:08:13]
And this fellow found a website that had absolutely ridiculous prices on every chair on that website. And a lot of those chairs were all brand-name chairs, even ones that we carry. He comes back to us and says, “Hey, will your price match this price?” And I think there was a Daiwa Supreme Hybrid for like $8,000 or something ridiculous. And then we asked him for a link so he could verify the price. And I went through the website and the prices were absolutely ridiculous. So I requested some input from some of the principals of the distributors. And I said, hey, do you know anything about this website? And they said, “Yeah, we’re aware of it”.
[00:09:06]
And so, what somebody did was they took an existing website, cloned it, and then they dropped all the prices. Now, the problem with that is they’re not authorized distributors for sure, because you’re not allowed to advertise those kinds of prices because they’re ridiculous prices. And also those are the rules of the distributors. So number one the chairs are probably not even available. And if another company is sponsoring this lowballing and rule-breaking website, eventually it’ll come back to them because the distributors always find out who the source of the sales are. And they would lose their distributorship. So it’s very, very costly for a distributor to do something like that, to try to circumvent pricing.
[00:10:00]
But secondly, you’re not going to get any warranty. So, if you’re going to call for warranty support, they’re going to ask for the serial number of the chair that you have, if in fact, you even got a chair from that bogus website. So they’re going to ask for the serial number of the chair. They’re going to ask for a copy of the receipt that the consumer got from whoever was running that website. And then they’re going to be comparing that. They’re not going to see that that serial number came from a legitimate dealer, if in fact, you even get the chair. So if you’re under an authorized dealer, your customer will have zero support: no warranty support, no parts and labor coverage, nothing.
[00:10:55]
So it’s very, very risky. But the problem is, as is not uncommon throughout all kinds of industries on the internet, there are scams out there and people will fall for them. They’ll place an order. They won’t get their chair. They’ll call Diawa and complain, Human Touch® or whatever the company is. They’re going to say, ‘Sorry, we have no record of that purchase,’ or they’re going to say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. We don’t know who you are. That’s actually coming from this other company.’ And then they will find out. They’ll put two and two together and realize that the whole thing was a scam. So buyer beware.
[00:11:30]
You know that I wrote my booklet about it, Buyer Beware. And it’s a popular booklet because it covers a lot of things that are shady in our industry. And the whole purpose of that booklet was to protect you the buyer, the consumer from getting ripped off or getting a bad deal. Now, this is the first time I’ve seen this scam website. At least I think it is. Maybe I’ve seen one, years before, but nothing in recent memory. And at my age, recent memory is all you got. Anyway, that’s not something I even have in that booklet, so I need to update that because that’s a tough one.
[00:12:09]
People who are strictly price shoppers and all they care about is having the lowest price, they don’t care about support, they don’t care about warranty, they don’t care about after-sale warranty, all that stuff, and they just want to get price, oh, they’re going to get sucked into these kinds of sites. So be very, very careful. Oh by the way, this website didn’t even spell the word massage right, which was the first clue when you looked at the URL. Anyway, I thought I would tell you that just to make sure that you don’t get ripped off in your quest to get a massage chair. If it’s too good to be true, it is. Believe me.
[00:12:51]
Anyway, I just wrote an article this morning. Actually, I started yesterday. I finished it this morning. It’s about tips. The headline is a little dramatic. I think it’s Secret Tips Of An Insider When You’re Buying a Chair. And I talk about the things you need to consider when you’re buying a chair, one of the biggest things is people buying these chairs online through these nice, slick advertisements. And they’re good advertisements. And I can’t even speak to how the chairs are because I’ve never sat in them. But there are off-brand names, right? Well, if you buy it online and you’ve never sat in it, there are a lot of things that could surprise you in a negative way when you get the chair.
[00:13:33]
Like it won’t fit either height-wise. The height is high or short. Width wise. It may feel horrible on your back because a lot of those cheaper chairs are made in cheaper factories with cheaper components. And that thing might just beat the living tar out of your back. And you might like that, but you may not. So there’s a lot of gamble when you’re buying a chair online without actually seeing it. And not to mention if something goes wrong with a chair, can you even get through to them? Do they have a phone number? Do they have customer support? What’s their warranty? What’s the return policy? You don’t know any of this stuff because you’re captivated by the price. Again we’re going back to price shoppers.
[00:14:11]
Now they do help people get into the market. A $2,500 chair or whatever gets people in the market but it might leave them with a terrible taste in their mouth if things go south or sideways fast. Anyway, you can check out that article. I cover some things there. It’s a good one for people who are looking to get a massage chair. And one thing I hear a lot when I get phone calls is ‘It’s so confusing. I’m so confused by all the data, all the information. I don’t know what to do.’ And that’s common because there are so many options out there, and they’re not all above board. They’re not all great.
[00:14:50]
Anyway, we’re trying to protect you from those kinds of things so you don’t end up spending money that it’s going to be hard for you to replace it, but at the same price, getting another chair because you’ve already spent all that money on a chair that maybe ends up being a raw deal. Anyway, take all that with, well, not with a grain of salt. Take it for real. Because we’ve seen these things. It’s legit. We’ve seen these kinds of issues. Take it for what it is. And of course, you can always reach out to us. If you ever have any questions, you can call us. Our number is right here. It’s 888-259-5380. And we can help you walk through the maze of finding the right chair at the right price, too.
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Anyway, I hope you found this video helpful. If you did, please feel free to thumbs up like us on our YouTube channel and help us spread the word about massage chairs by sharing this video with your friends and family and on your various social media platforms. We do appreciate you helping us out with that. I’m Doctor Weidner and I will see you again in two weeks. Bye.