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, while 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 29 year old Steve Jobs who 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. I was wrong.

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. The company 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.

Question: Do you have any stories to share about pre-1986 seated massage?

My love affair with chair massage began in 1982, four years before the first professional massage chair came on the market. This is the story of what it took to get that first massage chair built.

The problem
The team I had assembled to begin providing seated massage in the workplace and at events were all graduates of the massage school I owned, The Amma Institute. One of the first questions we confronted was how to comfortably seat our customers for the massage.

Regular chairs had backs that limited the massage to the shoulders on up and we had already decided that our acupressure massage needed to include the “bladder channel” points traditional Chinese medicine that are located alongside the spine and run all the way down to the hips.

We tried turning chairs around and having the customer straddle the seat. That worked for some people on some chairs, but didn’t work at all for people in skirts or on chairs with arm supports. Then there was the fact that most office chairs had wheels.

To deal with all these considerations, I realized that we would always have to provide our own chairs for our customers.

One of the first massage “chairs” was a drummer’s stool

Solution #1: Evolution
At that point in time, the best chair turned out to be a stool–no backs, no arm rests and relatively portable. We ruled out any stool with a hard seat (too uncomfortable) and looked for stools that folded and had good padding. Camp stools with canvas seats almost made the cut, but proved to be too uncomfortably low for most customers and practitioners.

We finally settled on a stool used by professional drummers. They had thick cushions, height adjustable seats and three sturdy metal legs that conveniently collapsed for portability. While they were expensive, $80-100, they added a very professional look to our enterprise.

Stool massage with no support

Unfortunately, there were two problems with massaging on stools. Since we were providing Japanese acupressure, in order to apply pressure to points on one part of the body, the opposite side had to be braced. Not so much of a problem on the top of the shoulders and arms, but working on backs required some tricky coordination.

Consequently, part of the protocol involved making certain that the feet of the customers were in front of their knees and their hands were on their legs.The other issue was that the further we got into each massage, the more the customer relaxed and started listing forward, or backward, or to one side or the other. Either they had to hold themselves up or the practitioner did. The situation begged for another way.

One design inspiration for the first massage chair

Solution #2: Revolution
Back in 1979 the first “kneeling” chair was developed in 1979 by Norwegian Peter Opsvik. Called the Balans chair, they hit U.S. shores in the early 1980’s. I loved the concept.

When I started seriously working on the first massage chair, I knew that the kneeling angle would be incorporated into the design.

In 1984, I crossed paths with a young French cabinet maker, Serge Bouyssou. The first time we met I explained the concept of seated massage and told him my specifications. “I want a chair with a Balans-style base that also supports the customer leaning forward into an angled chest and face support with a place to rest the arms. Oh, and by the way,” I said, “it has to be portable.”

Early Prototype of the chair. Notice the slot in the chest rest for the face.

Serge took this all in for a moment and then said, “Oh. You want a box.” “No, no,” I replied, “I want a chair.” More firmly he insisted, “No. You want a box.” Then he went to the whiteboard and proceeded to draw out how a chair could be built using a box as a base and with detachable supports–which could be stored inside the base–for the rest of the body. “You’re right,” I finally agreed, “I want a box.”

It took three prototypes to get to a version of the chair that a person could actually sit in. At that point I felt confident enough to show it to Jim Everett, the owner of Living Earth Crafts, an early manufacturer of massage tables in Santa Rosa, California. Over the next two years Serge and I worked with Jim to develop a series of pre-production models that kept refining the original idea.

Finally, in May, 1986, the first High Touch Massage Chair emerged from the Living Earth Crafts workshop and the face of an industry was born. Later that year, I showed off the chair for the first time to a group of 38 massage school owners and offered to come to their schools and teach their students how to use it. In the next 16 months I taught chair massage classes in 24 schools throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe. By 1990, all of the largest, and many of the smaller, table manufacturers had their own version of the massage chair and close to 100 massage schools were offering chair massage courses.

Jim Everett and David tinkering with the chair

Living Earth Crafts retired the original chair in the mid-1990’s as more lightweight designs with tilting face cradles emerged. I joined forces with another company, Stronglite, and co-developed the chair I now work with – the Ergo Pro.

Jim Everett has passed away but I am forever grateful that he and Serge had the patience, foresight and courage to embrace an idea for which there was no discernible market and to invest their time and money to make it a reality. There is no doubt that all three of our names belong on the first patent for a portable, knock-down massage chair # 4,746,167, which you can read here . You can also view the original images included with the patent.

If you have any stories about the original chair or the early days of chair massage, please leave them below or send them directly to me.