Chair Massage ( Massagem na Cadeira ) por David Palmer

Criador da Massagem na Cadeira e Criador da Cadeira de massagem.

Um pouco da historia dos começo da Quick Massagem

The first time we nervously walked into

Apple Computer’s Macintosh division in 1984

to provide seated massage with our matching

grey slacks, white polo shirts and blue

blazers, we felt overdressed. At a time when

the largest computer company in the world,

IBM, was still requiring dark suits, white

shirts and ties on all of its workers, Apple

employees were all about jeans and T-shirts.

We immediately breathed a sigh of relief and

settled in for a year that would change the massage industry forever.

Apple Computer was already a high-flying, high-tech legend helmed by

Steve Jobs that was revolutionizing the nascent personal computer

industry. But equally significant, Jobs was also redefining the relationship

between a company and its employees. With the casual dress code and the

pirate flag that flew over the Macintosh building, Jobs was heralding and

prototyping the shift away from the 20th Century paternalistic, conformist

corporate culture that treated employees as replaceable parts working for

a paycheck.

Instead, he was inventing a 21st Century ethic based on the belief that

fundamentally work should be an outlet for creativity and that the most

productive workers are those who are challenged to perform to their

highest potential and whose work makes a difference in the world. At

Apple, employees were judged not by their resume, education, clothes or

experience but by their intelligence, passion, creativity and performance.

Jobs nurtured an employee-centric environment. He rejected the idea of a

personnel department and instituted a human resources staff charged with

creating a workplace that was inviting, exciting and supportive. Apple

employees were expected to work 60 hours a week or more, but Jobs

wanted them well taken care of.

One of the departments working long hours was in charge of writing the

user manuals for the new hardware and software products and, at that

particular moment, they were under deadline. The head of the

department, Chris Espinosa, was trying to figure out how to spend his

monthly budget allocated for employee amenities. They already had the

beer busts on Fridays and the occasional private, first-run movie screening,

but he was looking for something special. By chance, a friend handed him a

flyer advertising a service that would bring massage right into the

employee cubicles. Definitely a crazy idea, but that was exactly the kind

innovative service that fit the Apple culture.

When I got the call from Chris, I was ecstatic. Up to that point seated

massage was an experiment. We tried every way we could think of to

market this new approach to professional massage. I knew we needed a

high profile company to put its imprimatur on our work before we would

ever be taken seriously. Apple was a perfect match for chair massage and

ultimately turned out to be our ticket to success. But not in quite the way I

had imagined.

After our first visit to Chris’s department, we were invited back the

following week. That’s when the folks in accounting, a few cubicles over,

said they would like to get in on some of that massage action. Each week

we kept adding more departments and doing more massages.

At the peak of our work with Apple seven practitioners were offering up to

350 chair massages a week with the company footing the entire bill. I had

visions of megabucks dancing in my head. I thought that our little service

would turn into a tsunami that would soon sweep across corporate

America, but that was not to be.

The honeymoon at Apple ended in 1985 when the first downturn hit the

personal computer industry and Apple was forced to lay off 800 employees.

Apple could no longer justify paying for first class airline tickets, fresh

orange juice, or massage. We withdrew our services from Apple for two

months, until the dust of reorganization settled. When we returned, it was

the employees who were now paying for seated massage. Our client base

plummeted to about 60 massages a week.

There was going to be no tidal wave, at least not in the corporate world.

What actually had occurred was that a company ahead of its time, Apple,

found a service, seated massage, that was also ahead of its time. The bulk

of the business world ignored us. Massages at work? Who were we

kidding?

However, by taking a chance on chair massage Steve Jobs did revolutionize

the massage industry. He helped us prove that, given the right conditions,

chair massage was a viable service for the workplace. We were also able to

leverage our experience at Apple into dozens of national and local stories in

the press, television, and radio. It turned out that the media loved chair

massage. It was an ideal “Cinderella” story. Out of the ashes of disrepute

(read: massage parlors) and into the corporate boardroom came chair

massage.

That publicity, in turn, laid the foundation for my revised long-range plan to

bring professional touch to the masses. In 1986, I sold my portion of the

business to a partner and began the task of creating a chair massage

profession by training chair massage professionals. In May of that year,

when the first massage chair came to market to coincide with the creation

of the first training organization, On-Site Enterprises (now TouchPro) to

teach table massage practitioners how to perform and market chair

massage.

Then, finally, the tsunami did in fact hit. When I showed off the massage

chair to 34 school directors at a meeting of the American Massage Therapy

Association that August, the response was immediate and overwhelming.

During the next 12-months, I taught 20 chair massage seminars at schools

throughout the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway.

For the massage profession chair massage was truly an idea whose time

had come. Within four years, by 1990, virtually every massage school in the

United States was teaching their students about chair massage.

The revolution Steve Jobs inspired was not just a technological one, but a

cultural one as well. It extended far beyond computers, phones, and media

distribution systems and deep into our perception of work and the work

environment. While a chair massage industry was probably inevitable, the

innovative laboratory that was Apple Computer provided chair massage

with the credibility it needed to move forward at a critical moment.

Today, thousands of companies around the world embrace chair massage

as an essential part of the workplace and tens of thousands of practitioners

make their living providing affordable chair massage services to hundreds

of thousands of customers each year. Thanks, Steve. You changed the

world in more ways than you will ever know.

SOBRE DAVID PALMER

"David may not have been the first to discover Chair Massage, but, like Columbus, there is no doubt that he was the first to put it on the map."

That was the perspective of Scott Lamp, President of the American Massage Therapy Association, in November 1997, when he chose to honor David Palmer with the prestigious President's Award for his contribution to the massage profession.

Massage Magazine calls David the "father" of contemporary Chair Massage for the significant role that he has played in the growth of one of the most ubiquitous segments of the bodywork services industry. In 2007, David was an inaugural inductee into the Massage Therapy Hall of Fame.

David began his professional massage career in 1980. Before his teacher, Takashi Nakamura, returned to Japan in 1982, he prepared David to assume operation of The Amma Institute. The Amma Institute was the first school in the United States exclusively devoted to traditional Japanese massage. It was here that David first began experimenting with teaching his graduates to work on clients seated in a chair, rather than lying on a table. In 1989 David stepped down as Director of the school to focus full-time on the development of the Chair Massage industry.

Developer, the first chair for seated massageIn 1983. David began work on the first special chair to make seated massage comfortable and convenient for both the customer and the practitioner. In 1986, his chair was introduced to the bodywork profession by Living Earth Crafts and has served as the basic model for all subsequent massage chairs. To date there are over fifteen massage chairs and tabletop units on the market that have been sold to hundreds of thousands of practitioners worldwide. David currently works with Stronglite manufacturing company to develop and maintain the best massage chair on the market.

AuthorDavid has written extensively about Chair Massage and the massage industry in general. His book, The Bodywork Entrepreneur, was used as a standard business text in bodywork schools during the 1990′s. He also developed Marketing Chair Massage, which is considered the best primer on the subject in the field. David has had numerous articles published in Massage Therapy Journal, Massage Magazine, Massage & Bodywork and industry newsletters.

LecturerDavid is a frequent keynote/banquet speaker and presenter at a wide variety of local, national, and state massage conferences and conventions including the American Massage Therapy Association, the Florida State Massage Therapy Association, the Alberta Massage Therapy Association, and the AMTA Chapters in California, New York, Ohio, and Texas. He is often invited to be on industry panels and conferences to contribute his unique point of view on current issues.

Previous CareerPrior to entering the field of massage, David spent ten years as a developer and administrator of social service programs for nonprofit agencies in Chicago and San Francisco. His work included the creation of the first nationwide social service hotline in 1972, the National Runaway Switchboard. While working for the Wieboldt Foundation, in 1974, he staffed the development of the first association of private family foundations in the United States, the Donor's Forum, a model that has been duplicated in major cities throughout the country.