User Comments - randal

Posted on: The Dragonfly Experience

Sorry I have say that our intent in China is to offer a service on the level of a 5 star hotel - but at a 3 star price. 5 star hotels can be very pricey. In other markets the positioning is a bit different.

Posted on: The Dragonfly Experience

I am not sure whether this means I am boring - or relaxed? Hopefully the latter. Our mission as a company is "to relax the world" - so perhaps by having a semi-hypnotic voice I am achieving this purpose?

Posted on: The Dragonfly Experience

Not a small number of questions here for me to respond to - I hope I can hit on the most salient ones.

Going backwards, I was in the Navy from 1986-1991. My destroyer did not even have GPS and there were two laptops onboard - a far cry from today's computer intensive environment. Certainly Canada was part of NORAD - not sure why you asked this. The important thing to note is that the USSR was our adversary and as a Russian major, but a line officer in the Navy I had few options to exercise these skills and Intelligence branch was pretty much impossible for me because we had a chronic shortage of line officers in the Navy. In the middle of my military career the Berlin wall came down -and as I left the Soviet Union disappeared so a new reality emerged.

Dragonfly did focus on expats as our target market, but did not offer to them something they could find back home - rather we offered a high quality & stylish massage treatment at a price much more affordable than the 5 star hotels. The menu was simple and our focus was on the details (design, service quality, consistency, relationship with our customer, etc.).

We are a private company - with 3 partners, Georgie Yam, Eve Zhuo and myself. Our financial affairs are strictly confidential.

Dragonfly started in 2003 in January. 2 months later SARS appeared and almost killed us since our tourist customer base evaporated overnight. The spring of 2003 was a tough time but we weathered through and emerged in a very good light because we took very good care of our customers during that period. Within 16 months of opening our first shop (140 m2) we launched our flagship (350 m2) and introduced the Nail Spa. The pace of growth began to pick up then. 2005 and 2006 saw a big jump as we opened shops to cover more territory in Shanghai and launched into Beijing where many of our customers travelled.

About our (Olya and myself) risk in coming to China - we came here with nothing but our 3 year old boy. We hopped off the plane with a few boxes of shoes (Olya's) and a desire to have a new cross cultural experience. After Olya studied for a year in Vancouver our intention was to come to Asia. In 1998 the rest of the region was in the tank - but China was healthy and so we seized on Shanghai because of its interesting history. It was a crazy thing to do, especially for a Canadian with a child. But there was something magnetic about this city and its development - and this magnetic attraction has kept us here until today.

Neither of us came here with much knowledge of Chinese - hence my love for Chinese Pod to help me keep improving my language skills. Keep it coming Jenny!