From White-Label to Proprietary Technology

Greeting from Minnesota!

I'm Jay Tang. I and my wife, Xia Huang, founded this company to make and sell vibration plate.

We both come from engineering backgrounds, with me majoring in mechanical engineering, and her in material science and engineering.

Before venturing into making vibration plate, we run a contract manufacturing service - SpecsPro LLC, specialized in providing custom casting and machining services. We possess practical knowledge, experiences, abilities, and expertise in engineering and manufacturing.

Seeing the opportunities ecommerce bringing to countless entrepreneurs, we decided to develop and manufacture our own finish products, and sell them online. In 2017, we started our ecommerce business out of our basement in Eagan, Minnesota.

We decided to target a niche market, considering it to be easier to build up a brand name in a small market segment.

Particularly, we intended to find a line of products out of traditional manufacturing, which suits us old-school engineers better.

Through our guanxi in the manufacturing field, we came across vibration plates, which were not well-recognized in the market despite being already sold as mass-produced commodities.

Google search on "vibration plates" returned millions of pages. Amazon.com already had a subcategory called vibration platform machines. This subcategory was not crowded, and the listed products were all off-brand. There might be some good opportunities for us to make a difference. We decided to give it a try.

White-labeling

We started with white-labeling vibration plates from existing models developed by a Chinese OEM factory - Jintuo Mechanical & Electrical Manufacturing Co., Ltd.

For our first production, I selected three vibration plate models out of two dozens models that Jintuo had already developed. I made some cosmetic alterations to differentiate our models.

Obviously, I affixed my label - Vibration Therapeutic™ on each machine. I chose this descriptive brand name for easy identification and recognition, also because the domain name was available.

In Oct 2017, our first shipment, a thousand units of vibration plates in a full 40' ocean container, made its way to our warehouse in Minnesota.

We listed these products to sell on Amazon.

Initial Recognition - VT003F

VT003F was well received by Amazon customers and won the Amazon Choice marking in the first year.

While pivotal oscillation type of vibration plate prevailed on amazon.com, VT003F was the only affordable high frequency and low amplitude linear vibration plate model on amazon.com.

Many informed customers wrote insightful product reviews sharing their experiences with VT003F and the health benefits they gained. This greatly inspired and encouraged me to pursue my studies in vibration therapy.

My own use of VT003F also achieve good results for treating my chronic knee ACL injury.

VT003F Design Constrains

As many VT003F vibration plates are sold, quality issues exposed. I dismantled every returned defective machine to pieces, took the notes, and worked out a list of improvement tasks in detail for my OEM factory to implement in my next production.

In my efforts to improve VT003F, however, I encountered a fundamental constraint of its original design: VT003F has too many parts for a machine that vibrates at a high frequency range. Too many assembly processes also add accumulated errors and inconsistency. The quality of VT003F heavily relies on workmanship.

I decided to design a new model which would keep the vibration patterns, parameters, and functions of VT003F, but re-engineered with integrated structure and refined materials to reduce the number of parts and assemblies.

VT007 Development

My new model initiative came with two simple concepts:

1. For a machine that vibrates, it is more reasonable to build it with less parts;
2. Less parts mean less accumulated assembly errors, quality less relying on workmanship, and therefore achieving better consistency - the product quality being more controllable.

In my effort to reduce parts, I integrated the components and eliminated unnecessary decorative parts. Parts stay in their original material color and texture without coating. The overall machine structure is a modern industrial style, open and revealing. Defective parts would easily be discovered and avoided. Maintenance or repair, if ever needed, will be easy.

Although the mechanism of vibration plate is rather simple, it takes several rounds of prototyping, re-design, re-tooling and change of material combination to make it right, and to achieve the desired vibration pattern, frequency and amplitude.

I named this new model VT007. It has a cool appearance, no disguise, and effectively performs its assigned tasks.

VT007 comes out as a robust, durable and reliable machine. With its modularized industrial style, warranty service will be easily facilitated.

In July 2021, we launched VT007 in the US.

VT007 is so reasonably and logically designed that I would say it is probably the best affordable home-use linear vibration plate ever made.

Proprietary Technology

The launch of VT007 marked a major milestone for our young company. From this lengthy and tedious re-engineering project, we developed our technical know-how, patented design, and manufacturing processes. We have advanced from white-label to proprietary technology.

In 2021, we started to declare Vibration Therapeutic® LLC as a manufacturer, not only to differentiate us from numerous white-label sellers, but also to convey our long-term commitment to product quality and service accountability.

10 Year Warranty

In 2022, we started to offer a straightforward 10 year product warranty, advanced from the previous 2 year warranty.

Through analyzing our defective statistics, we believed that offering a 10-year product warranty would not materially impact our bottom line, while providing greater value and assurance to our customers.

We are confidence in our product design, quality control and continuous improvement programs. We set aside sufficient fund reserve and replacement parts inventory to back our 10 year product warranty.

China Quality Insight

We learned our own "China Quality" insights in making vibration plates in China.

The stereotype of "China Quality" actually pertains to products made by numerous small OEM factories in China.

Most products listed on amazon.com, including all vibration plates, are manufactured by these small OEM factories in China. The productions are labor-intensive, low precision, and lack of consistency. Product quality heavily relies on workmanship and, often times, relies on the mentality of the factory owners as well.

a worker assembles a VT003F

For the manufacturing of vibration plates, there is not a set of industrial standards in terms of design, raw material, parts, components, quality standard, and testing equipment. There is very limited or no production automation.

Thanks to the robust industrial environment in China, entry barrier for manufacturing is low. It takes a very short time to set up a new factory and start to assemble products like vibration plates. Parts, components, and processes can be easily outsourced to various specialty factories near by.

The positive side is that new product development, from design to final production, can be quickly deployed and implemented. However, volatile supply, unstable production, and unpredictable quality often go hand in hand.

a ventilated robot welding line at Jintuo

Small workshop factories usually outsource most intermediate-stage parts and components to specialty factories.

Well-established factories, such as our OEM factory Jintuo, tend to be more vertically integrated, and have key parts, components and assemblies finished in-house for better quality control. They are more willing to invest in automation to reduce the reliance on labor and workmanship.

For outsourced parts and components, well-established factories tend to use larger suppliers for reliability and stability. They have better bargaining power but they don't necessarily go to cheap small workshops.

Quality standard in small factories is low. Typically, factory owners would consider a 3% defective rate acceptable for products such as vibration plates. This is for major defects like dead-on-arrival and dead-after-short-use. Minor defects, like cosmetic issues and minor assembly errors, are loosely controlled.

An unique insight of "China Quality" is that guanxi places an important role when dealing with small Chinese factories. Developing and maintaining a good guanxi is essential, not just for quality.

We worked out practical solutions to deal with "China Quality" in making our vibration please and get our defective rate greatly lowered.

How We Deal With "China Quality"

Our main approach is to take more control and responsibility of the engineering and manufacturing processes, and develop practical strategy and implementation to consistently reduce the defective rates.

• Verify and maintain a consistent bill of materials and the list of all upper stream suppliers for raw material, parts and components.
• Extend quality control process to key upper-stream suppliers. This is mainly for the control console which is outsourced to a specialized PCB factory.
• Re-engineer, re-design the products and manufacturing processes for automation, better consistency and less reliance on workmanship.
• Invest in advanced tooling to improve parts precision and mechanical performance.

The corporation of our OEM factory Zhejiang Jintuo Mechanical & Electrical Manufacturing Ltd is the key to our strategy and implementation. Jintuo’s owner Mr. Lin Bo has been very supportive and patient to work with us in product development and continuous improvement.

I like Jintuo being a family own-n-run business.  We make quick decisions for adjustment and improvement. Over the years, Lin Bo and I have become the best friends. Our mutual trust and support are an essential asset of our business.

The implementation of our strategy has achieved great result on model VT007. After several production runs with continuous improvement efforts, we have less than 1% defective rate in the first year of use. After the first year, the failure report has been rare.

Most defective issues are still with the control console. However, because VT007's control console is a separated plug-in type box, replacing the control console is effortless. We ship out a replacement control box same day or the next day after a warranty claim is received.

For VT003F, we have about 2% defective rate in the first year of use.

Quality issues and fixes of VT003F

Our Value Proposition

After 6 years of dedication, with over 16,000 vibration plates sold and thousands of happy customers, we humbly assert that we have been providing our customers with quality products, reasonable prices, and exceptional services. We remain committed to continuous improvement and the pursuit of even higher standards.

The true value customers expect is effective health improvement solutions. While vibration therapy applications still lack scientifically approved guidance, we actively engage in our own studies and share our honest findings. We earnestly walk alongside our customers to help them achieve their goals and live a quality life.

New Product Development

We are working on another linear vibration model - VT009, an all-metal structure.

VT009 will come with a 4mm amplitude, designed for more aggressive users who are looking for more vibration intensity than VT007.

It will come with an optional detachable handrail. Many customers asking for a hand rail on VT007. However, VT007 has a light machine weight. There is risk of fall-over if a hand rail is installed on the machine.

I have had two round of VT009 prototyping done, but still not getting my desired results. I think the next prototype will be close to what I want. Stay tuned!

Below video is me doing a VT007 unboxing video at my home office. Hello :-)