My guest this week is Randal Eastman, vice president of Dragonfly, a renowned therapeutic retreat chain in China. Randal talks about how Dragonfly found a niche of serving expat clientele with a quintessentially Chinese flavor. He also shares his experience of raising three kids in Shanghai.
Not sure if your comment is appropriate? Check our Commenting Policy first.
New lesson idea? Please contact us.
tel: (302) 482-8078 / +86 (021) 5178-6708
email: support@chinesepod.com
Suite A301, 2452 Wanhangdu Road,
Shanghai, China 200051
This feature is only available to paid subscribers. ChinesePod offers 5 paid subscription types.
| Basic | Starting from $14 per month |
| Premium | Starting from $29 per month |
| Praxis | Starting from $39 per month |
| Guided | Starting from $49 per month |
| Executive | Starting from $199 per month |
To find out more about these subscription types, please click here.
To upgrade your account, please click here.
This feature is only available to Premium, Praxis, Guided and Executive subscribers.
| Premium | Starting from $29 per month |
| Praxis | Starting from $39 per month |
| Guided | Starting from $49 per month |
| Executive | Starting from $199 per month |
To find out more about these subscription types, please click here.
To upgrade your account, please click here.
Hi Jenny, its great to hear your program again. Randal made an interesting point on competing on service rather than price. The photos on the dragonfly site are wonderful, it looks very classy, and the prices are not expensive relative to prices overseas. Nice interview Jenny, your guests are very open with their answers to your questions. It’s a great program with lots of very useful information both business and cultural. I hope you keep it going. Im sure more listeners will come on board as they realize the value of this program.
Nice to see the Jenny Zhu show back in action. Will tune in later today.
Will
Jenny,
I'm no pro on interviewers, but listening to this show and thinking about an interview of yours I listened to a year ago I believe you have worked very hard at finely tuning your interviewing skills and have become an even stronger interviewer.
Keep up the good work. see you tomorrow c-pod.
This one was impressive:) I was just mapping Dragon Fly locations on a map for a magazine:)) How about leaving the mentioned vocabulary on the discussion board for our newbies and elementary learners?
thanks, this time it was interesting! Keep going!
great podcast theme!! very informative! :)
Overall, I thought this was a nice interview. Some points:
My going in perception of Dragonfly would have been that it was replicating what the spa experience is like in the US. And I would agree, it's very different from what the typical Chinese massage outfit is doing. But the way it comes out in the interview, it's sounds as if Randal and his partner were saying,"we've done the heavy lifting around analyzing competitor positioning, strength, customer base, market opportunity and so on", then then the spa idea fell out of all that, rather than starting with, "let's replicate the western idea of a spa experience, and we will rule China". Maybe this is a chicken and egg problem, but I think that would have been helpful to have a bit more clarity on.
I guess it would also be interesting from a business/human interest standpoint to hear ultimately how much risk was Randal taking to come to China with his wife and family. Without going into a lot of personal detail, was the decision to come to China easy for Randal and his wife because they had a giant nest egg to make things work here, and if the first couple of ventures failed, it was no big deal? Or they were down to their last 500 RMB, and then they fell into what became Dragonfly, but there was a lot of ramen noodle breakfasts, lunches and dinners between when Dragonfly started and now?
By the way, when did Dragonfly start? Did the venture experience meteoric growth, or was it one store for the first 5 years and then just blossomed? Has the company always been profitable? Is it profitable? How many employees? Did they have to take loans to grow, or was it all personally financed by the partners? If they got loans, who did they get them from? How many partners are there? What is Randal actually responsible for at Dragonfly? Marketing? Operations? Business Development? How has his skill set expanded? What was he not good at that was exposed in helping Dragonfly grow? It would have been interesting to have some color around the company's evolution.
It was definitely good to hear about the challenges facing the company, and how Dragonfly had to resort to training its own people in order to ensure the quality of the customer experience.
I guess the good business idea is that someone could always found a business selling stuff to expats things expats miss from home and can't get here in China. But somehow, if there is a difference between the simple statement I just made, and what Randal and his team have actually created, that needs to be brought up and highlighted.
Lastly, when was Randal in the Canadian Navy? or rather what period? Was he in NORAD while he was in?
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!
Thanks for the answers. In reply:
I asked casually about NORAD because I knew Canadians in NORAD, and I was curious if our paths crossed and I didn't realize it at the time. Obviously, with time on a destroyer, it sounds like you didn't make your way to Cheyenne Mountain at any point.
Regarding Dragonfly's positioning, i'll take your word for it. I've casually looked for spa prices at 5-star hotel, and they're hidden from casual view. Dragonfly is certainly cheaper than the spa experience I gave my wife back in the US.
Randal speaks as though he is the most relaxed individual on the planet. When he talks, you get the impression that he will fall asleep after he completes each sentence. If this is the result of frequent massages, I need one.
Jenny!!!! Welcome back. More shows please!
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?
whats this neesh they keep saying? Niche?
yes, niche, as in this case, a market segment. Dragonfly doesn't position itself to serve everyone in China that wants a massage, just people with enough money to pay for a specific "experience" that goes along with the massage. So it's filling the market niche of people willing to pay for a high end massage "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.
Maybe Mslack is one who says "nitch".
It's a potato/potahto thing, but I like the Frenchified version better. Sounds more cosmopolitan! Better for the high-end massage biz maybe too.
In the grand scheme of things, I think it's interesting that of the people that post, or the people that might be interested in posting, that there seems to be way more interest in the cultural aspects of China than the business aspects of China.
I would have loved a business show that discussed details of the business model and earnings model of Dragonfly or a small business in China.
Guys,
Thank you so much for your encouragement! It has been great to get to know my guests and hear their stories of working and living in China, a place that has become part of home. Now I will pass the batone to Randal himself, who is an avid Poddie himself for the past 3 years. Looking forward to his own comments.
i stayed somewhere in shandong, approximately 1 hour from qingdao a few months ago. i tried chinese spa but it didn't work for me because my chinese was awful and their English wasn't good either. i wish i knew dragonfly existed in qingdao *sigh*
hope to see one in shenyang soon ;)
@Jenny
You make a very good fist of this job. :-)
I am interested in business in China, and how industry is organized, but I am not so interested in business serving foreigners.
Any plans to talk to Chinese business people/ leaders? Organisations serving the general population?
For instance, I once ran into the people in a Wildlife Protection Society - there are no foreigners involved. This revealed another side of China to me. Also, I am learning how many Chinese-run charities exist. We in the West, I think, are conditioned (brain-washed?) into thinking that only foreigners do charity work in China. Or foreigners are the main instigators of charity work - this is a mis-perception of Chinese society.
Just an idea. And if I have missed such a podcast, my apologies.
@bodawei,
谢谢你的鼓励！You might like this interview I did with a local charity organization Bean. Although set up by an American woman, Bean has a good mix of expats and locals who share the same goals. Their current president is a Chinese girl.
@de41546,
Many Chinese wouldn't even stand a typical Chinese massage. Your body is left more sore than before, but many people go for that pleasure and pain feeling.
@Jenny
Thanks for the link .. I had a quick look at the comments and I can see that it is hard to please everyone with a show like this. I will just reiterate my preference for more focus on the Chinese community and Chinese language, because I am here to learn the language.
Ha ha, you are so right about massage. A couple of months ago I was 'steamrolled' into a massage that left me bleeding initially and then bruised for a few days.
@jenny
lol tell me about it!!! frankly i didn't enjoy it because it was rather ticklish
"... they were not catering to foreigners, they were not catering to a sophisticated clientele."
foreigners = sophisticated
yet, I see most foreigners coming to China in search of bargains.