We’ve attended Rise every year, and it continues to be a wonderful collection of kind humans perpetuating greater gentleness to the rest of the world. This is the third annual Rise gathering, and it promises to be just as third eye-opening as the previous ones.
Last year, Graham and Ashkahn got to sit down with Kevin McCulloch and Jacob Resch, the organizers of
During that conversation, Kevin shared his thoughts on how Rise compares to the Float Conference. As he says, it’s a “gift that the Float Conference is already operating” since it’s “the pulse of the entire industry… and we wanna focus on this little sliver. And it wouldn’t even make sense to do that if the Float Conference wasn’t servicing the whole industry.”
(If you’d like to see some of our coverage from last year, you can check out the podcast episodes where Graham and Ashkahn took live questions all day or you can check out the live blog we ran during the presentations.)
It’s difficult to talk about
Kevin and Jake will no doubt be leading us in thoughtful conversations, introspective meditations, and sharing the warmth and love that they feel for everyone who comes.
At Rise, everyone does everything together at the same time. If there’s a presentation going on, everyone is in the audience. If there’s lunch, everyone is at lunch. If it’s time for guided meditation, you’re right there for guided meditation. Each event bonds you closer with the rest of the people there until
One of the best ways to see this contrast is to look at the speakers who attend both events. Justin Feinstein, the head researcher at the Float Lab at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, shares updates on his research every year at the Float Conference, and at
While Glenn and Lee Perry are consistently delightful and kind, in the context of
Even Graham and Ashkahn are more laid back at
Not to mention that St. Louis itself is such a lovely city. There’s always something to do, and getting to visit Float STL is really a treat.
So far, every year we visit, we take a group trip out to the City Museum, which is like no other place on Earth. If you’ve never been, it’s a surrealist wonderland for children and adults. Beyond being just a museum, it’s a monument to the oddities that exist within the human mind. While yes, there are historical artifacts, artwork on display, and educational experiences aplenty to be had, the entire building functions more as a giant playground filled with wrought iron structures, disturbing tile mosaics, and a giant ball pit at the center of a climbing maze. Honestly, it’s something that needs to be seen to be believed.
In short, if the Float Conference is like a family reunion, Rise is like coming home for the holidays. It feels so cozy and familiar. In both cases, everyone there is family, but the setting for
*Also, consider this an open invitation to join us this year at the City Museum! We’ll be visiting Monday, May 6th, after the Rise gathering has concluded. Below are just a handful of images from the museum to help entice you.
Ten-story tall slide
Ashkahn marveling at stamps
Museum Parking Lot
The Odditorium
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How to compete on price without slashing prices
Let’s say you’re a float tank center and more centers are starting to show up in your town…
Or, maybe you are that other center starting up a town that already has float tanks…
As new centers enter the market, the typical response is to run promotions on daily deal sites, promote large specials, and/or run Facebook Ads selling floats for much less than the usual offerings.
The best case scenario is this price slashing behavior subsides shortly after the neighboring center opens.
But what if it doesn’t? What if an existing competitor decides their new price is even lower?
How do you compete with a price slashing neighbor without competing on price?
Learn a few ways to make price a non issue with your customers…
Float On’s Halloween Spooktacular!
‘Twas briny, and the epsom groves fluttered with salt-bats, a lurking fog floating atop the murky bog. From the dark maw of silence came a guttural groan, an eerie utterance akin to those of monsters. From the depths of darkness, that groan turned into what mortals...
Timeline for Opening Up a Float Center
Opening up a float center is a lot like climbing a mountain. Even if you can see the peak, it’s a lot further away than you think, and when you finally get there, the journey and the destination usually end up being different than previously assumed.
In this post we’ll lay out a general process and timeline of what you may encounter on your path, from initial idea to actually operating a center.
Can you have volunteers at your center?
So you’re thinking about using volunteers in your float center?
Before we clarify what a “volunteer” actually means, we’ll first explore why a float center might be considering them in the first place. While it can be a way to provide floats to people who are otherwise unable to pay, the impulse to bring in volunteers can also stem from a desire to get some sort of free labor (later in this post we’ll dive into why you can’t actually do this, but it’s important to recognize that the instinct is understandable, especially when you have someone lined up and willing to work for free).
In addition to a desired boost in overall productivity, it’s also a way to invite more people into your center to experience what you do. Some customers actually want to help out and see what happens behind the scenes at a center.
Floating and Athletics, a Strong Relationship
One of the beautiful things about the float tank is that it serves to rejuvenate the whole person. — the body, mind, heart.
Broadly speaking, it’s a tool for homeostasis, an ideal environment that supports balance, health, and growth. This piece will look specifically at floating and athletics. For anyone who defines themselves as an athlete, or as a general pursuant of athletic endeavors, the float tank can be a powerful asset.
In this post, I’ll discuss individual athletes who float and how to look at this from a marketing perspective. I’ll also discuss past and present research, and share some thoughts on how the relationship between the athletic and floating communities might continue to unfold.
A Skeptic’s Guide to Floating
I think it’s time we addressed the giant metaphorical elephant in the salty metaphorical room — there are lots of exaggerated and untrue claims about the benefits of floating being spread around the industry.
Some are anecdotal, some are only half true, and some are just patently false. Floating has historically had a strong oral tradition tied to it — the practice has survived through word-of-mouth, one passionate floater teaching another everything they know. The unfortunate thing about this is that the information disseminated can’t be reliably tested or shared with others on a broader scale. You can’t use “my buddy Chris” as a source for a health benefit of float tanks in a newspaper article, much less for a research paper.
Now that we’re becoming a bit more mainstream, we thought it would be nice to add some clarity to what we should and shouldn’t be telling people about these difficult-to-understand, saliferous containers.
How Many Float Tanks Should I Have?
Intro If you’ve crossed over into the sacred realm of “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna open up a float center,” an obvious question arises — “How many tanks should I have?” Now, if you’re like me, you’re creating a 90 tank float community where everyone who buys in...
The Construction Secret to Soundproofing: Storage Between Float Rooms
If you’ve ever taken a look at our construction materials or gotten advice on soundproofing, you’ve probably heard of the importance of including “air gaps” when building out your center. What that means and why it helps can be a bit of a technical question, and the practical implementation can seem daunting and unreasonable.
Float Conference 2017 Recap
Now that the salt has settled, I’m sharing some thoughts from “The Great Gathering of People Who Really Love Being Alone Sometimes in a Dark, Briny Room,” also known as The Float Conference.
The conference has always been an amazing opportunity to connect with the pulse of the broader float industry and, if this year’s gathering showed us anything, it’s that our collective heartbeat is as strong as ever.
2017 Float Conference Program Introduction
Every year, I have the great pleasure of writing the introduction for the Float Conference program, and every year we share it on our blog so that members of the industry who weren’t able to make the journey out to Portland are able to check it out. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
From all of us at Float Tank Solutions, where our time is measured as the space between two conferences, thank you again for a wonderful year!
– Graham Talley
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