Myself and four of our instructors just got back home after sharing Fijian Barefoot Massage in Phoenix at the AMTA national massage convention! We set up a booth in the exhibit hall, provided about 45 Barefoot Matwork sample sessions, and talked to many of the 1,500+ Massage Therapists in the conventions attendance that visted us!
Meet the feet: We had such a powerhouse of instructors present at this event – I’m not even sure if the visitors to our booth knew the extent of our team’s history and experience in the profession. Myself (Jeni Spring) from Central Texas, Sara from Missouri, Hillary from North Texas, Ashley from Southern California, and Dawn from upstate New York. (Click each name to be taken to their instructor profile pages!)
Each one of these Barefoot Massage Barbies have been using their feet as massage tools for ~at least~ 10 years – double that in some cases! Dawn Dotson is our FasciAshi Range Of Motion instructor who designed the portable bar system that you can strap into and use with a portable, electric, hydraulic table or a mat. Sara Newberry is an author of the 1st ever Hot-Ashi Barefoot Massage class and has been on many podcasts talking about our Barefoot work. Hillary Arrieta is a published author with her own massage book and is our lead Fijian/Matwork 1 class instructor trainer. Ashley Shears is a Fundamentals class instructor who is making waves with her approach to myofascial barefoot work on the table and on the mat. (Ashley also roadtripped to Phoenix with a knife that came in very handy in the booth all weekend because we forgot to pack scissors!) I was there, too, and I’ve also done cool things. đ
It was great for this section of our instructor team to meet other leaders and forward thinkers in the industry, to find old friends, to share selfies with AMTA royalty and instructor buddies, to get our feet on the pulse of as many people as we could to share Barefoot Massage with, and to talk with the masses of LMTs in attendance to see what they have questions about. (There were so many people there!!!)
I want to tell y’all all about this experience, from beginning to end: read on and enjoy our journey to the desert!
We started the trip with a group visit to enjoy flaming drinks and the pirate ship excapism vibe at Undertow, found local coffee daily, laughed and cried as we watched the Barbie movie together, rested in the hallways with our legs up the wall for our self-care, ate peanut butter cookie dough chocolate ice cream for nightly dessert in the desert, and we capped it off the last day with a sunset surrounded by cacti at the Botanical Gardens! So worth it!
Sara first approached the instructor team with the idea to have a booth at the Phoenix AMTA National Massage Convention earlier this year, but it didn’t really get moving until July, when we recognized more of us were actually available to attend than we originally thought. So we made things happen! We found a great Air BnB with a kitchen (technically it was booked though a new company called “Sonder” – look them up to see if they are in your city!) and we coordinated how the 5 of us would most easily get to Phoenix from Texas, Missouri, New York and California – and all land at similar times to carpool in Ubers together, while still sharing the load of the hard work during booth set-up (<<click that hyperlink to watch a time lapse of our booth set up) and tear down. We are SO glad this plan came to fruition, the 5 of us had a great time working together behind the scenes and onsite: and we really enjoyed all that Downtown Phoenix had to offer.
The planning stages for this event involved working with our display consultant, Debi Ward Kennedy, Visual Designer, who helped us design an eye-catching, branded booth environment and source the supplies needed to bring the layout on paper to life in person. I love to look ~outside~ our profession when it comes to doing something different, and to help our booth feel homey, talking with a retail and home decor design expert to find budget-friendly ways to create this DIY really paid off. So yes, Debi is my mom, but she’s the best at what she does, and I love supporting women-owned businesses!!! She’s helped me design Heeling Sole’s retail space and event booths in the past, she did this work for Disneyland, and is a constant cheerleader of the Center for Barefoot Massage. Check out the before and after of our booth in the video below, and read her recap on the branding/design process here! The only thing that didn’t work like I wanted was the balloons: my funny idea added to the mix… the balloons were supposed to be toes on the feather banner behind us, but they wouldn’t stay up! Womp womp.
Each instructor calibrated their marketing plan for the event and packed their bags with shwag to pass out. We decided against demonstrating our Myofascial Ashiatsu Barefoot Massage – because that meant one of us (me) would have to drive to Phoenix with our favorite portable bars (yep – the ones mentioned earlier, designed by Dawn, available for our Alumni to purchase.) The team wanted to either just have a meet-n-greet style booth where we talk nerdy barefoot massage, or the usual demonstrate Barefoot Massage schtick. We decided to do both, meanwhile sharing a ~different~ style of Barefoot Massage with the masses other than westernized ashiatsu. (Not all Barefoot Massage is Ashiatsu Barefoot Massage, after all!) This group brainstorm session between us all is what spurred a recent meme riffing off our catchphrase, and inspired a new banner that we “feetured” at the booth as a real conversation starter: “The future of Barefoot Massage is a Foot: Change my mind!” (Protip, go ahead and try, but it’ll be hard to change our minds!)
To help support our planned 3-days worth of Fijian work, I wanted to figure out a way to get our FasciAshi strap into play, so that we have all options available to provide the work effortlessly in person. If this were only a 1-day event, the Fijian massage technique itself can do without the strap, honestly. Traditionally, the work from this approach is done standing, seated, and even with the practitioner laying down – but since we’ve carried on the Fijian legacy for Lolita Knight, we’ve also incorporated the Strap as a tool for the LMT to employ as “kneaded.” I wanted the strap there in person for people to see in action, and to support our team of instructors working hard all weekend at this AMTA National Massage Convention!! Since we had no walls to hook our straps into at the booth, I met up with my welder to reinforce and customize an equipment idea that I’ve had – unoficially named the FasciAshi Strap Rack. Before you say anything further: no the strap rack is not for sale, yes I’ve thought about patenting it, and yes I got it to Phoenix from San Antonio by airplane. Moving on: no more questions on that topic, LOL!
As experienced pro’s in the business, we wanted to set examples and standards for our past and future students to look up to – so we made sure that we charged for our sessions. That decision was not in place to make a million bucks, but just to reinforce the value of the work and our time. We charged $30 for 15 minutes for every session provided onsite. Every single one of us instructors has a history of e-x-t-e-n-s-i-v-e experience managing massage event tents, and the combination of ideas between how we strategized each day cooperatively came together beautifully. The booth ran smoothly and was a lot of fun. As one of the few booths at the convention even offering touch-based samples, we were VERY popular! (We were also told a few times that we were the only ones cleaning the surfaces and our “hands” between clients: so just a friendly note to our vendor friends, just take the time to do the right thing, your efforts are being noticed.)
Our conversations with onlookers ranged from explaining how the strap is the essense of our approach to Barefoot Massage, to talking about the Massage Research posters in the hall. We talked about what Fijian matwork can offer differently than what a table-top Ashiatsu Barefoot session can do. We discussed the Myofascial Ashiatsu work and the many ways you can specialize in Barefoot Massage through the training pathways we have laid out. We got nerdy with the big wigs about changes we’d like to see in the profession, talking to NCBTMB, AMTA, FSMTB and other industry giants while standing up for the world of Barefoot Massage and sharing how we experience the profession. We met entire schools of new student massage therapists who haven’t even graduated yet, and helped expose them to more options of what they could do in their future careers. We talked with massage school owners about how we can think about job placement for our students like they do. We met a lot of already-practicing Ashiatsu Massage Therapists, and I think we just spurred interest for an entire wave of future Barefoot Massage practitioners.
This 2023 AMTA National Massage Convention was the 1st exhibit hall booth appearance that the Center for Barefoot Massage has done since we opened in 2017. Our instructors have been popping up at their local AMTA Chapter events as we can across the nation, and we taught a record-breaking, biggest ever Barefoot Massage class at the World Massage Festival in Las Vegas in 2018 – but this was our first booth as a company, and I’m really glad we got to showcase what can be learned in our Fijian / Matwork 1 class, while also seeing the FasciAshi strap in action!
Our entire instructor team already feels strongly about how we feel that the future of massage is a foot – and being at the AMTA National Massage Convention was just another step to get the profession closer to that version of the future!
Stay tuned for a few upcoming Fijian-focused blog posts from our instructors who live and breath that work.
Be sure to read more about how you can learn the Fijian Barefoot Massage technique in our Fijian/Matwork 1 class, and read it’s course description here.
Thank you, Jeni, for the awesome opportunity to work with you (again!) on a design plan for one of your business spaces… it is always fun working with you, and I am so happy that the results of our collab were so successful for CBM and your team! Helping you to make a brand-centric statement at the national AMTA convention to promote all that you offer while not making you lug tons of heavy materials and props to Phoenix was my goal, and it’s amazing to see your set-up video showing how easily it all came together for you. (I can’t even begin to tell you how fascinating that hammock frame – turned – strap support system is to me – you are SO inventive!) FYI: I’ll be sharing this project on my retail visual design blog soon (www.DebiWardKennedy.com links to BOTH of my blogs) and I thank you for the photos!
I’m not at all surprised that you were popular with convention attendees, either – what CBM offers the industry and clients is truly valuable AND incredibly interesting, and this first appearance at AMTA will likely be the first of MANY in the future! Well Done to all of you!