For the past 6 years, Float Tank Solutions has released the State of the Industry Report for the float industry based on a survey we release each year at the beginning of summer. Over the years, we’ve refined the process and adjusted the report, making it more robust, thorough, and accurate. It has expanded every single year, sometimes adding entire sections to the report.
This year has been the largest expansion since the report’s inception and putting it together was no small task.
You may have heard about the online discussion we hosted about the report this year. The full video is linked below, but first, I’d like to go over some of these changes.
Cross-Year Analysis from 2014-2019
Since we now have industry data for every year going back to 2014, we decided to try out a cross-year analysis for some of the most 
common questions we’ve asked over the years. While we didn’t get to dive too deeply into this data, we did get to look at several questions and it has shown some really interesting trends across the years.
This data is useful for a few reasons. Most significantly, the responses that remain consistent year over year provide us with much better confidence in those results. This is particularly exciting because our survey has a relatively small sample size to begin with, so there’s already uncertainty baked into our responses. Inversely, when the data makes a huge shift, we can recognize that because the rest of the data remains pretty normal. We may not know why exactly infrared saunas have gained so much popularity in conjunction with floating, but we can see that it’s not just a one-off trend year over year.
Real World Data Pulled Directly from HelmBot
Undoubtedly the most exciting addition to the report this year is the inclusion of data from HelmBot customers. Since this information is pulled directly from their operating software, it removes a lot of the issues of personal bias or confusion from the regular survey.
It was important to us that we respect Helm users’ identities throughout this process. When requesting the data we used a double opt-in method so we couldn’t get any false positives. Through our collection process, each center’s data was randomized and assigned a number code, making the information useful, without being recognizable. From here we could safely aggregate the data like normal and turned it into the colorful, pleasing graphs that you’ve come to love (let Graham know what you think of them, he worked hard to make them look good while keeping them informative).
Finally, we wanted to include the video from our chat with the industry. It’s a lengthy discussion for sure, but definitely worth the review. Graham and I could easily talk for hours on this report and it was exciting getting to see where people’s focus landed with the information we presented.
If there’s something not covered here, please reach out to us, we love talking about this information and we want to make sure that it’s as useful as possible.
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