Anyone can sell on features. Heck, all massage chairs are a collection of mechanical and electrical parts. They all have a mechanism, a massage track (typically S-track or L-track), air pumps, actuators, solenoids, and on and on and on…. Motors, rollers, footrests, lights, maybe a USB port, air ionizers or speakers. They all have programs controlled by a remote.

But comparing lists of features does not tell the whole story. (In fact, you will put most customers to sleep regurgitating a long and irrelevant list of features.)

Consider this analogy: 
Suppose instead of massage chairs, you compare recipes for a familiar but somewhat exotic dish. Like chicken casserole. One recipe you have secretly obtained from a generous friend in the restaurant business who owed you a favour. His restaurant happens to have two Michelin Stars. Good stuff guaranteed. For the other recipe, you pick one more or less at random off the Internet.

Here is what will strike you about the two recipes: you will quickly discover that the ingredients themselves are almost identical. Small differences, sure. One lists six chicken thighs, the other, two breasts and four thighs. One has a yellow AND a red pepper, the other just a red pepper. Four tablespoons of olive oil in one. Five in the other. Garlic? Check. Wine? Check. And so on.

With all the similarities, you would expect the results to be similar, right? And they will be if you cook them both yourself. But let’s say instead you cook the one from your friend who has two Michelin Stars, and you make your friend cook the one you randomly grabbed off the Internet. Does anyone in their right mind think that these two chicken dishes will taste the same? 

You and your celebrity chef friend used basically the same ingredients, featuring essentially the same components, yet you know that the results will be different. You might like yours just fine…until you taste your friend’s. 

That is why there are Michelin ratings, after all. Not every chef is equally talented. Not every chef has what it takes to create a Michelin star chicken casserole from the very same ingredients available to the casual home cook…. the same ingredients available to everyone.  

Same ingredients; a radically different result. This example offers you no new information. We all accept that great chefs create great food from the same set of ingredients that lousy chefs use to create lousy food. 

The same is true with massage chairs. What really matters in a massage chair – the “master’s touch” – that separates the ordinary from the extraordinary, the “Meh” from “Wow” is all about the “chef.” A great massage chair is well planned, seems to anticipate your needs, and just feels better than the run of the mill products, even in the many cases where both models are comprised of a similar set of features.

How do you find that magic? Furniture For Life’s magic ingredient is our focus and devotion to offering compelling choreography in all the chairs we design and program.

We hope you think our chairs are nice to look at, but it’s what you do not see that’s where we put in even more effort.

What you cannot see are the intangible elements that call the chair’s framework and moving parts into action. These are deployed by the programs we design, write, rewrite, retest and redo that is part of our chair development process. Furniture For Life designs chairs from scratch, so you get no off-the-shelf, unremarkable factory programming from us. 

We use choreography “designers” that make magic on the inside. In consultation with massage therapists and shiatsu masters (like sensei Okabayashi for all OHCO models) our development team in Boulder, CO. USA translates the precise human massage movements into hundreds of thousands of lines of code. 

The result of all the time and attention we place in choreography means that all the movements you experience in our products seem to work just right – timed perfectly, just as you would expect from a masterful ballet or symphony. But you don’t “see” any of this, nor can you evaluate it on a list of features; yet, choreography is even more important than features. 

As in any work of art, we do not settle for the first draft. In fact, that is just our starting point. It took us well over two years to get our OHCO choreography right. We tested, reworked, then redeployed until the sequencing felt like massage delivered by a masseuse. Our sensei master tested the prototypes again to recommend improvements, then our engineers went back to work. Our own team in Boulder tested and gave more feedback to improve the user experience. A select group of dealers give us their input (Sounds like a tough job, right?). 

Our choreography is designed to increase circulation, improve range of motion, work deep muscle tissue, and guide you to a place of exaltation and deep relaxation. These are deliberate design elements for wellness of mind and body. 

When the choreography is finally ready, only then do we release our chairs to market. It takes longer to design the intangible choreography than all the tangible (feature) elements…it is not even close for us. 

Choreography is what matters, and you cannot find that on a features list comparison.