| Spa Spotlight: Oasis Day Spa |
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This Fall, Spa Week at Grand Central's Vanderbilt Hall provided a chance to sample spa treatments from the best spas in the world. Included was a local NYC favorite, Oasis Day Spa, perfect place to visit with Winter upon usOasis Day SpaOasis on ParkOne Park Avenue Monday-Friday 10 am-10 pm Saturday-Sunday 9 am-9 pm Oasis at the Affinia Dumont Hotel 150 East 34th Street, between Lexington and 3rd Avenues 2nd floor of The Affinia Dumont Hotel, next to The Barking Dog Restaurant Oasis at JFK Airport JetBlue Airways, Terminal 6 JFK International Airport 212-254-7722 oasisdayspanyc.com With Winter upon, a retreat into a vacation spa seems a perfect escape from the cold and the seasonal blahs. If you can't escape for more than a few hours a day spa is a perfect alternative. This Fall, Spa Week at Grand Central provided the public with a chance to sample spa treatments from the best spas in the world. Included was the local Oasis Day Spa. Oasis Day Spa is one of the best known local spots with several locations around town. Oasis Day Spa co-owner Bruce Schoenberg (he handles the business while his wife, Marti, handles the creative and treatment side) took time away from featuring his spa to talk about his company and the general state of the spa world in New York City. Q: Is it hard to have a spa in Manhattan and is it more difficult than in other places and other cities with space restrictions and difficulties of intense competition? Bruce Schoenberg: New York City is a unique location for any business because of what Manhattan represents to not only the people who work here, the people that live here, but because we are a destination for tourism and there are a lot of people that come to New York to experience, whether it's New York City of what they consider to be the epicenter of the United States. There is a challenge for every business to live up to the expectation. Now, for Oasis Day Spa, the challenge for us is not just that there's a tremendous amount of competition within our market segment, but there are other challenges in terms of costs in running a business that are going to challenge you at every level—in terms of marketing, in terms of staffing, in terms of rent, advertising. To run a business in New York City is a major undertaking that requires an incredible amount of research, an incredible amount of fortitude—it's not like going into a small town around a rural area where you have exclusivity, where you have captured the market. There isn't the level of competition and that's what every business in New York has. When day spas became the phenomenon that they did, and we're lucky we caught the wave here in New York, you've seen the business grow exponentially. So to anybody new coming into the market—what are they going to be doing that's going to capture the public's imagination, for them that's going to make their own niche? For us, when we came into the industry, when you opened the Yellow Pages there were 55 day spas there—now there are 255 day spas so the competition has increased five-fold and we keep market share. So there are the challenges. Q: Can you run down an abbreviated history of you and Oasis? BS: Well, it's not just me, it's my wife and I. My wife, Marti, was the one you could say was the visionary. I was a trade show producer and Marti and I met when I was in Chicago doing a show. She was a massage therapist, I was a trade show producer and we did this long-distance romance. Yeah, I am a crazy man. So when I finally realized that I wanted her to move to New York and marry me, she was hesitant because I was on the road a lot with my other industry—I was a trade show producer doing shows all over the country. Q: Which company were you with? BS: I had my own firm. I was a small trade show operations company that other companies would hire to work for. So I was in Chicago and when we finally tried to get her to come to New York, she said, "I'm not moving to New York for you to be on the road 14-20 weeks a year." I started looking at other businesses, this was back in '96. The day spa industry as you know it today was not emerged. You had a couple of day spas, Red Door was here, Georgette Klinger, and the image they had was blue-haired little old ladies went there and it wasn't main stream. For your associate next to me [Sydney], spas are now a part of her lifestyle. It wasn't that way, and especially it wasn't something that men looked at 12, 15 years ago. I started to do the research. My wife was a massage therapist; it was an emerging industry but she had never run a business, so all the protocols that go into understanding what it takes to run a business, that's where our separation of duties at the spa came in. I'm the business end and Marti is the creative end. She looks at the products that we bring in, designs the feel of the spa, looks at the services ... I'm the one who looks at the business and does the marketing and advertising and so we have that division of duties. I did the research and wrote the business plan eight times; I had to be sure that the business could succeed. I wasn't going to leave a business that I was making a couple hundred thousand dollars in for a retail industry that is very challenging and dependent on customers. Before, I was dependent on me; I went out and got the clients, but I did the work. Now at Oasis Day Spa, I'm in the back of the house and the people that you see doing the services, I'm dependent on them doing a great job, I'm dependent on my receptionist stafff understanding customer service as we do it and making sure that they connect with our customers. Our image is as such and I don't know whether either of you had heard of Oasis Day Spa prior to this event. Q: The Oasis brand seeems ubiquitous. You guys are one of the biggest, cooler, hipper spas in the city. You and Bliss... BS: Bliss has a little different philosophy than us in how they deal with customers, but while I can only tell you that Bliss is a corporately owned entity now by Starwood, I think everyone in the spa industry now owes a debt of gratitude to them, because Bliss is really the company that blew everything up, that really made the PR element of the industry and brought the awareness of it to everybody. Q: 10-15 years ago, no one thought of the day spa. Spas were something you went away to. You didn't go there for an hour or an afternoon. You didn't go there with your friends, that wasn't a concept. BS: Interestingly enough, what spurred us on when we did our research was that we wanted to make our services affordable, we wanted to make it unpretentious, to be able to reach the average New Yorker, we wanted to make it something that was exclusive, we wanted to break down those barriers that made people think it was only for Donald Trump and for the rich and famous to go there. That's not what we were about, we felt the services offered were an important part of a healthy lifestyle and we wanted to bring it to the average New Yorker. Even today, we have luxury locations but our price points are still below competitors that would be at our level. We had three locations ... we lost one to a fire in 2006, and that was actually a great story that was covered by a lot of the media because of the way we handled the emergency. When the spa was destroyed, how we dealt with our employees, we think we became a model for how other companies should handle crisis management, for how we treated our staff with the ultimate respect. We did everything we could to place them somewhere so they could pay their rent. We have 240-odd employees and there's 240 people paying their rent because of Oasis Day Spa and that's something that weighs on Marti's and my minds all the time. We are a family owned business and everyone who works with us, we consider to be our family. Even last night, one of my long-term managers, who has been with me for four and a half years, is moving on. He's leaving on great terms, he just needs a change. We had a going-away party for him and it was a teary moment because it was somebody who was leaving the nest, really. He's one of my staff who I love dearly and I wish him the best. In fact, an aestitician who's working at another spa just came over to say hello, and though she moved onto another opportunity, got her training with us and she just said no one trains their staff like we do. Q: Even with massage, spas also reflect this growing interest in alternative medecines, alternative lifestyles, and alternative spiritual elements. The emergence of day spas is a reflection of that, where you can incorporate meditation, healthy regimes, and herbal awareness. BS: The industry is expanding on so many fronts: holistically, spiritually, there is a place for that. A lot of spas, that becomes the focus of what their message is and helps define who they are as a spa. We try to create a holistic environment. We were one of the first spas in New York to go completely green, all of our products are green, how we clean the spa is green. Everything we do is natural, both of our skin care lines are natural, the offerings in the relaxation room, everything is green. We're in touch with that - always were, fortunately, so it's not like we had to switch over. We ended up doing a big exploration of a lot of the products to make sure they complied with what we consider a "green philosophy." Q: With the pumpkin mask you have, you must change a lot of things seasonally based on the time of year, such as different treatments in summer and winter? BS: Well, interestingly enough, you talk about seasonal treatments, how it impacts your skin, how it impacts your hair. Right now, we've been dealing with a lot of the marathoners. It's not a new story anymore, but there are a lot of people who have been training very hard, so not only are we helping them prepare for the marathon, you can imagine what next week's going to be like post-marathon. Skin care treatments are very seasonal because of the climate changes in the northeast. Oasis is the American Cancer Society's spa in New York, and we do a lot of work with them. In the beginning of the summer, we did a big melanoma outreach to educate people about skin cancer. We deal with a lot of skin issues in the summer where people go out and aren't prepared for the sun and they get sunburned and have other skin issues that arise. Then we go into winter where the air gets drier and people have other skin issues from that. Obviously through the course of the winter, all of us New Yorkers that are now layered up get little things growing on our bodies, so we do a lot of body scrubs, to try to remove the dead skin and try to keep you nice and smooth and shiny. Definitely, the change in seasons plays an impact in services that we offer. The service we're offering [at this time] is a pumpkin facial. We obviously tied it into the fact that it's Fall and Halloween, but the pumpkin treatment that we use is a great skin care treatment. We use a lot of mineral-base, we use a lot of vegetable base, we try to use all natural products. Pumpkin itself has a lot of features of the products that are really good for the skin. Every product line that we bring in is tested by us, we do a lot of research. One of the aspects at Oasis we're most proud of is we are not a trendy spa. For years, everyone was extoling the virtues of "oxygen facials." We weren't going to tell people that other spas are kind of hosing them. Things like an "oxygen facial," a "caviar facial" - there is no value to your skin. The big rage a few years ago was these oxygen bars. Your body at sea level is already over-oxygenated and you can't put more oxygen into your body. People say up in Vegas they're pumping oxygen into casinos to keep people awake; they used to do that because in Las Vegas, they used to allow you to smoke in the casinos and the reason they pump more oxygen is because people that were inhaling the smoke, particularly non-smokers, were rejecting it. It's interesting, when you see people who date, you rarely see cigarette smokers with people who are not cigarette smokers. I personally could never kiss somebody who smoked cigarettes - it's not just the smell, it's like kissing an ashtray! That plays a factor in many of the treatments we bring in - we stay away from trendy, we do the tried and true treatments that we know. We are all about results. We want to make sure the service that we're offering will deliver what we promise. We don't do cellulite treatments, you know why? There is no treatment that's going to get rid of cellulite. It's just not happening! We don't say that we're going to get rid of your wrinkles. Guess what? Go get botox if you want no wrinkles. At the spa, we can't get rid of your wrinkles, but what we can do is for a short period of time, our treatments will reduce the appearance of wrinkles. But unless you're going in and getting microderm abrasion, and even that will leave your skin red, there are no magic bullets. We do not offer service that are trendy, that promise things that we can not do. That may detract other people to go to another spa that makes that promise. Again, when somebody promises you something and doesn't come through, I think that leaves a taste of bitterness we don't want to deal with. © Brad Balfour and Sydney Francis 2007 |
