Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
The Question: Will the home tank market and its low prices affect the commercial float industry negatively?
Our Answer: We don’t think so! In fact, home tanks increase the visibility of our industry.
Tune in to this short Daily Solutions Podcast, or read the text below if you’re at work and you need it to make it look like you’re doing important stuff.
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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: So today’s question is, How does the invention of low cost in home float tanks affect the viability of starting and running a float tank center?
Ashkahn: I think it’s probably not going to have much of an impact, or maybe a positive impact if anything.
Graham: Yeah, that’s my feeling very much as well. I don’t think that you’re losing a lot of your most regular customers or anything, even to having a float tank in home.
Ashkahn: Yeah. I mean like, if you have a float tank center by this point, you know how hard it is to have a float tank setup somewhere. It’s crazy. The amount of salt, the amount of maintenance, all that sort of stuff. Hopefully that stuff will get better over time, but it’s still going to be a lot of people who prefer to go to a float center than to have the space for one in their home, or the cost of one in their home, or the maintenance of one in their home.
For the people who do have one in their home, to me that’s just like a huge point of conversation. Any time anybody goes over to that person’s house, they’re going to be like wait what is that, and that’s just that many more people that know about float tanks. I don’t know, I could be wrong, but I’d be surprised if that like took down the industry, because everyone started buying float tanks for their houses.
Graham: At the point that you’re floating less than once every couple weeks, or once a month, or so. If your thing is you like to hop in a float tank once a month, or once every two months it still probably doesn’t make sense for you to have a float tank in your home necessarily. Right? So there’s this whole market of people who are not coming in incredibly regularly, who just for no other reason than financial viability won’t go down that route.
Ashkahn: Time will really tell what ends up happening, but I don’t know that’s my personal hunch is that it probably won’t have to much of an impact.
Graham: In a similar sense that public pools and stuff aren’t destroyed by people having private pools in their house, or places where gyms where people can go and go into a sauna or a hot tub, aren’t destroyed by people able to have personal home gyms, or saunas, or hot tubs at their house.
It’s just there will of course be people who want that privacy, and want to take advantage of it. I think though there’s always going to be a broader group of people who are just not that regular users who would want to go to a center, and even having people take care of you. Not having to clean up after yourself is another big thing that I think drives some people in when they just want to be pampered.
Ashkahn: Yeah, definitely or just kind of everything about the amount of space it takes. I mean there’s some float tanks out there that are trying to fix that issue for people’s homes. Make them more space wise I guess.
Graham: I guess here’s what I’m trying to say, is I don’t feel like they’re competing markets. Like I feel like there’s a huge benefit to having a float tank in your home, and there’s a whole group of people who’s stoked about it, and that number of people is growing. I think that also the people who are excited to go into a float center and go float, of course there’s some overlap because floating is involved, but I think fundamentally they’re just two totally different markets growing in two very different directions, but both growing right now. I don’t see that much competition between them.
So, like we always say, take a walk or you’ll never know what’s out there!
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2016 Float Conference Program Introduction
It’s been my pleasure to write the introduction to the conference program for five years in a row, and each year I enjoy posting it up on this blog for everyone who didn’t make it out. I hope to see you all in 2017! – Graham
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The Float Tour Blog – Issue #15
New York is where it’s at, and it’s arguably the busiest place on the planet. People here live fast-paced lives and rarely – if ever – have time to slow the fuck down and enjoy themselves.
Just like Jersey, people here also see skepticism as a point of pride, and take it to an even greater extreme. All of this makes New York a sort of “proving grounds” for floating: if it can make it in New York, it can make it anywhere.
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #14
The Garden State houses probably the highest concentration of float tanks on the East Coast. Jersey is a gateway to the major metropolitan areas nearby: New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.
This convenience has made Jersey the suburban hub for every major industry on the East Coast for generations, giving it the highest population density of any state in the U.S. This is fantastic for the float industry; if there’s one statistic that correlates with successful float centers, it’s population density.
