Updates

Starting Soloflex

The original Soloflex logo

I have been urged by friends to blog about the beginning of Soloflex.  They have insisted there are many of you out there who would enjoy the story, or at least parts of the story.  I find it interesting but then again, I lived it.

My first memory of Soloflex began when Jerry, my husband, started looking high and low for a home weight lifting machine.  He had me on the look-out for anything that was similar to a Universal machine but one that was small enough for a home and cheap enough so we could afford one.  There just wasn’t anything like that so he decided to try his hand at designing just what he wanted.

Jerry was a jet charter pilot at the time and we lived in Las Vegas.  Jerry started obsessing about this and drew possible designs everywhere, mostly on napkins when he was on charter trips.  He did come up with his design but only after speaking with a lot of serious weight lifters to get their prospective on weight machines.  They all told him they much preferred free weights and explained to him why.  One very important point was the bar must be “free.”  This makes one’s weaker side work harder to balance the body’s symmetry.   Thus Jerry incorporated a “floating” lever arm, not fixed. The result was a machine that later obtained the endorsement of Arnold Schwartenagger.  Arnold said it was just like lifting a free weight bar.

For Jerry another big consideration was safety.  When you lift free weights you should always have a spotter in case you get into a jam like being pinned down by the bar.  With his design, Jerry built in safety.  The bar can’t fall on you thus no spotter needed.  His machine was the best of machines and the best of free weights.

Early days brochure

So now he had the mechanics done.  The only problem he was stuck on was the resistance.  What could he use?  He built his home weight lifting machine in our garage and showed it to our neighbor who was an architect.  He recommended a lighter, thinner wall steel.  Seems Jerry had built a machine that could easily lift a car!  It looked good-it worked good but the means of resistance was still a puzzle.  In the middle of the night one night he woke me to announce he had it!  He felt sure bungee cords like he had put on his little airplane landing gear would work great.  Sure enough they did.

Now to sell some.  We placed an ad in the Las Vegas Nifty Nickel.  And he sold one to everyone who answered the ad.  Jerry made all these first machines himself with the help of a very kind man named Arthur Curtis.  Mr. Curtis owned a steel distributorship in Las Vegas and he let Jerry use his welding equipment and offered his experience.  Jerry bought some welding equipment and a steel saw and began building the first Soloflex machines in our garage.

Jerry applied for a patent in 1976.  By 1978 we were in El Paso trying to get this Soloflex thing off the ground.  In that same year we excitedly flew to Las Vegas to pick up his newly issued patent.

We contracted with a company in El Paso to build 100 Soloflex machines.  And we moved to Roswell, New Mexico, our home town.  We decided Roswell would be a good place to start our new business because rent was cheap and grandparents could help us with our 4 kids.

We rented a small office and placed a regional ad in Playboy.  Things didn’t go so well.  The phone company had given us the wrong 800# so no one could call us and the 100 machines came out awful.  We went to El Paso and worked on these machines till we salvaged 80.  Then we ran another ad with the correct 800# and we sold all 80 machines.  ( One guy wrote to ask if we had torn the porch decking off old adobes to serve as benches!  Ouch!)

Old vet hospital

It had become clear we had no choice but to manufacture the Soloflex ourselves so we began in the garage (again!).  Jerry hired some work release prisoners to help us.  It was a struggle but we were able (barely) to keep up with orders.  After a few months we rented the veterinary hospital at an old deserted air force base there in Roswell to manufacture our machines.  Things went so much smoother.  Almost any place is better than a garage.  We hired more people.  Jerrry and I worked in the factory in the evenings and week-ends.  I washed steel, drilled holes in the spline and packaged the machines for shipping.  This is when we placed our first ad in Sports Illustrated.  Things really took off!  We were on the phone non-stop.  We would stay till midnight and still each morning there were hours of recorded messages from people wanting a free brochure or to place an order.  We worked on making newer and better brochures and ads.  You need to understand, these were things we had never done before, like creating brochures and ads and running a manufacturing plant.  Thank goodness we had such an awesome product.  It saved us time and again from many mistakes.

The orders were coming in so fast we couldn’t keep up with demand.  The shop couldn’t keep up.  One day Jerry shot the time clock off the wall.  He put everyone on a quota and when they had their quota done they could go home.  Within a week they met an even higher quota and were going home by 11:00.  Within a few more weeks production had gone from 8 a day to 48 with the same number of people.  They received raises all along the process to match their increased production.

In early 1980 we flew to New York City to talk to an advertising agency.  When we got there we were told the agency did not want our business because our ad budget was too small.  But 3 of their employees wanted to work on our ads and brochures.

Jerry, Stuart and me

In the summer of 1980 we moved to Hillsboro, Oregon (outside Portland) because we were having a hard time getting technical support for our business machines and purchasing our raw materials.  Roswell is an isolated little town in southeast New Mexico.  The closest town of any size was at least 200 miles.  Our new ads hit right after we got our office and shop set up in a rented space in Hillsboro.  These were the professionally done ads and they just bombed!  We went to the bank for another loan and to our pleasant surprise, they gave us one.  Jerry re-worked those ads and we were able to change some of the ads appearing in the magazines.  It was truly touch and go but when Jerry’s ads played the calls came pouring in.  Thank goodness for Jerry’s skill as an ad man.

When we decided to move from Roswell we invited our employees to move with us.  Most did.  We all drove up to Oregon in a big caravan meeting each night at a motel we had made prior reservations at for all the crowd.  We loaded all our shop equipment like saws and welding equipment and spot welded them to our flat bed truck.  At one weigh station we were told we were over-weight and had to rent another truck and re-load everything.  What a mess!

Incidentally, we chose Oregon because it is so beautiful and we chose Hillsboro because it had a nice little airport.  Jerry has to be close to an airport.

Anyway, we made it to Hillsboro and we did pretty good.  We paid back the bank and in 1983 we bought our own land and built our own office and factory.

Lots of stories.   Will share more.

First factory we owned

• Published by marilyn on April 1st, 2009 in Updates.
• 2 Comments

Do You Remember the Electric Football Game?

It’s Super Bowl weekend and I’ve got football on the brain too. Remember these….. they were awesome! All the thrills and spills of the Super Bowl, right in your own living room.

Soloflex has played four Superbowl ads, the latest in ‘95 at $1.2 million.   The first :30 second ad we played cost a half-million.   I don’t remember the year, around ‘87 I think.   This year’s ads are going for $3 million.   Think I’ll pass, not run.   Ha.

• Published by molly on February 1st, 2009 in Updates.
• 1 Comment

What’s a safe vibration level?

Two WBV platforms are now Canadian government approved as Class II Medical Devices.  This means they can be prescribed by physicians, like drugs.   No WBV platforms are approved yet in the U.S., a tremendously expensive proposition.   The first device approved was the Juvent.  www.juvent.com It operates at less than .3 g’s, barely perceptible to the touch.   World standards exist for allowable workplace exposure to whole body vibration.  High g-load amplitudes are not need to trigger the physiologic conditioning responses.  We engineered the Soloflex WBV Platform to fit within these Allowable Exposure to Whole Body Vibration standards; for the safety of our customers, because I didn’t want to go into court someday and explain why we ignored them and lastly, because a terrific pounding simply has no advantage.  I’ve not heard of any injuries caused by the commercial WBV platforms that operate well above these allowable limits. I hope I never do. It will restrict the entire industry.

• Published by molly on January 22nd, 2009 in Updates.
• 3 Comments

The World’s First Infomercial by Soloflex

It’s every young boy’s dream; to look like a man is supposed to look. There’s only one way to get there; pump some iron. Soloflex was the first product to make standard barbell and free body exercises safe to do at home, alone. This video was the first one produced, with a little help from Dan Weiden and Dave Kennedy, one of their first accounts, in 1983. Originally mailed in beta and vhs, we began broadcasting it when program length commercials were decriminalized with the Cable TV Act. The time was practically free. There were about 8,000 cable systems then, about half of them with enough subscribers to be worthwhile. Not one of the 4,000 stations we bought time from had anyone to take our money. It didn’t take long to teach them what they had to sell, and if they didn’t sell it to us they wouldn’t get any money at all when the time passed. We thought surely GM, or their advertising agency would spot the opportunity and Soloflex would have to act quickly before the rates skyrocketed. It never happened. Our selling cost per unit fell to almost nothing and our volume went through the roof. We’d automated the selling factory! Eventually of course, the costs did rise as more and more infomercials competed for the time. But…Soloflex didn’t invent infomercials, TV preachers did…the world’s oldest profession.

Jerry, Founder

• Published by molly on January 15th, 2009 in Updates.
• 2 Comments

Mother (Nature) knows best, whole body vibration works!

I’ve spent the majority of my adult life pretty far away from where I am now. At least as far as work goes. I spent 15+ years slinging booze and fried food, watching people overindulge in both all the while complaining about how tired and bad they felt. I’ve worked in restaurants on both coasts and in the Southwest. It’s the same every where, beer o’clock rolls around and it’s time for drinking and eating too much to blow off steam from a work day filled with too much stress. Seemed to work for most people, as long as the buzz lasted, but it started to bring me down.

In an ironic twist of fate, about 3 years ago, I moved to the fitness industry. I started out answering phones at Soloflex. At the time, they had just introduced the new WBV platform. The technology had been available for decades, but was just becoming widely available for home use, with the Soloflex WBV being the most affordable version. I’ve taken on new responsibilities since then, but I still get a lot of calls and emails about WBV. Some are questions and many are customers who want to let us know about their experience with WBV. Those are my favorite. It is really nice to hear that you’ve helped make someone feel good instead of facilitating a nasty hangover. I’ve posted many of the emails and letters here.

Over the years, I’ve talked to people who tell me what whole body vibration therapy has helped them with a variety of issues, from trouble walking to incontinence. A woman called us recently and said that her bone mass density had increased by 25% in two years of using WBV!

A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a very nice woman in Texas. We chatted a bit about whole body vibration. After a few moments, she started talking about cats and how purring, which has a frequency of about 25-50 Hz, (the Soloflex WBV operates at 28-60 Hz) is thought to be healing. I found this pretty interesting and began my own research after we got off the phone.

The idea that cats have nine lives is attributed to how rarely they are injured and how quickly they heal when they are injured. At cat can survive a fall of 5 floors and escape unscathed! They also have fewer instances of bone and muscle problems than other animals. There is a common adage among veterinarians, “Put a cat in a room full of broken bones and they will all be healed.” All of this is believed to be because of purring. Purring is believed to strengthen bones and muscles, relieve pain and stress (cats purr when injured and when giving birth) and promote healing. Mother Nature knows best, whole body vibration works!

I’m excited to share more customer experiences on our new blog. I’ll also cover topics such as stretching and yoga, as well as sharing my own experiences with WBV.

• Published by carlie on December 24th, 2008 in Updates.
• 0 Comments

Soloflex joins social media

It’s obviously hard to break from the crowd if you’re stuck in the middle of it.  Seeking that uncharted path is where it’s at.  Soloflex was the first company to broadly use 800 numbers in advertising.  We were the first company to use infomercials.  Both of these things were available to advertisers long before I tried them.  Why ad agencies weren’t using them still baffles me.  We did our own advertising, in-house.  Not knowing what we couldn’t do, we just did it.

Social media on the web is today’s new marketing opportunity.  Complicated to implement, yes, but it offers something no other prior form of advertising has allowed; a giant focus group from which to learn.  It is the customer after all who buys your stuff.   Learning where they’re coming from certainly seems worth the effort.

So, here Soloflex is on a new journey.  The last thirty years has taught some lessons, like don’t get complacent & don’t presume to know what customers are really thinking.  This should be interesting.

• Published by jerry on December 16th, 2008 in Updates.
• 4 Comments