From White-Label to Proprietary Design

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 on the internet. In 2017, we started our ecommerce business out of our basement in Eagan, Minnesota.

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

Particularly, we wanted to find a line of products from 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.

A Google search returned millions of pages on this key phrase - vibration plates. Notably, amazon.com already had a subcategory called vibration platform machines, which was not crowded, and the listed products were all off-brand. There might be some good opportunities for us to make a difference. Let's try to make things happen!

White-labeling

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

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

Obviously, I affixed my label - Vibration Therapeutic™ on each machine. I chose this discriptive 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 on Amazon.

Initial Recognition - VT003F

VT003F was well received by Amazon customers and won the Amazon Choise labe.

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

Customers tended to write very insightful product reviews to share their use of VT003F and the health benefits they got. This really inspired and encouraged me in my studies on vibration therapy.

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

Design Constrains

As many VT003F vibration plates are sold, quality issues exposed. I dismantled every returned defective machine to pieces, took detail notes, and worked out a list of improvement tasks 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. Additionally, too many assembly steps in the prouction line add accumulated errors and inconsistency. The quality of VT003F heavily relies on workmanship.

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

Development of VT007

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 controllable.

In our effort to reduce parts, we integrated the components and eliminated unnecessary decorative parts. Parts stay in their original material color and texture without coating or other cover-up. 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.

Another major change is that the control console is designed as a separated plug-in type box. It is not mounted on the machine body, so the vibration does not transmit to the circuit boards and the electronic components. Therefore, the product life is extended and the vibration noise is reduced.

Due to the covid pandamic in 2020, it took us almost two years to finalize the VT007 design. In July 2021, we launched VT007 in the US.

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

Proprietary Design

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

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

10 Year Warranty

In 2022, we started to offer 10 year product warranty, from the previous offerred 2 year warranty, and make our warranty terms straightforward.

With the knowledge of breakdowns in our defective statistics, confidence in our products design and quality control, and our continuous improvement programs, I believe that offering a 10-year product warranty will not negatively impact our bottom line, while providing greater value and assurance to customers.

We set aside sufficient fund reserve and replacement parts inventory to back our 10 year product warranty terms.

China Quality Insight

The stereotype of "China Quality" mainly pertains to products made by numerous small original equipment manufacturer (OEM) factories in China. Majority product items listed on Amazon are made by these small Chinese factories.

All vibration plates sold on Amazon are made in China, through traditional labor-intensive manufacturing with low precision requirements, all carriered out by small Chinese factories. Quality control and consistency is challenging.

a worker assembles a VT003F

Vibraiton plates have no set of industrial standard in terms of design, raw material, parts, components, quality standard, and testing equipment etc. There is very limited or no production automation. Product quality heavily relies on workmanship.

In China's robust industrial environment, entry barrier of manufacturing is low. It takes very short time for a startup factory to set up and assemble products like vibration plates. Parts, components, and processes can be easily outsourced to secondary workshops near by.

Therefore, new product development, from design to final production is very quick. However, volatile supply, unstable production and unpredictable quality are offen the critical issues for small factories.

a ventilated robot welding line at Jintuo

Small workshop factories usually outsource most intermediate-stage parts and components to other workshops. Well-established factories tend to be more vertically integrated. They have key parts, components and assemblies produced 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.

Small factory's quality standard is low. Factory owners usually consider a 3% defective rate would be acceptable for products like vibration plates. This rate means major defects like dead-on-arrival and dead-after-short-use. As to minor defects, like cosmetic issues and minor assembly errors, they could go wild.

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 good quality.

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

How We Address "China Quality"

Our approach is to take more control and responsibility of the engineering and manufacturing processes, and develop good strategy and implementation to consistently reduce the defectiive 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 assurance process to key upper stream suppliers. This is mainly for the control console which is outsourced to a specialized PCB factory.
• Re-engineering, re-design the products and manufacturing processes for improved quality, 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 continous 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 best friends. Our mutual trust and support are an essential asset of our business.

The implementation of our strategy has acheived 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. If passed 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.

We have a lean business operation. We outsource our order fulfillment operation to Strategic Warehousing, a reputable 3rd party warehousing service in Minnesota. We have Navegate, Inc to handle our international shipping and customs clearance. My ability in process management allows me to integrate and streamline the entire operations for efficiency and effectiveness.

Product development is essential for a long-term growth and success. I have many products ideas that are yet to be explored. This is another reason that I would like to focus on product development instead of sales and marketing.

Currently I am working on another linear vibration model - VT009. It is an all-metal structure with a larger exercise platform (640x480mm), 4mm amplitude. Brushless DC motor is adopted. It will come with an optional detachable handrail. This model is designed for athletes and other aggressive vibration training users.

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 :-)