Episode #573: How LightStim Revolutionized LED Beds and the Med Spa Industry with Steve Marchese

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0:48 It's easy to use. Go to the prospectwizard.com get a free 30 day trial. Talk to my boy Dave Gallen. He will get you all set up and let the leads flow based on the Wizard. Go get him. This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks. NYC had the pleasure of having Steve Marchese. We're going to talk about LED light. We're going to talk about what's legally available and what else is going on in the market. We're going to talk about the spread of med spas and the proliferation of this technology. Steve, welcome to your first Halo talks. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Awesome. So we've got a lot of friends in common as we've riffed about related to the, the med spa space and our, and our good friend down in Orlando, Eric Casserberry. But as you, you know take us back to, to when you started light stem and uh, and where that emanated from the passion and the frustration you saw as well as you know, where we are today. And we'll talk about the legal, you know, components of it as well. We, well the company's 25 years old. We actually bought the technology from two inventors and, and we, you know, at that time we made just handheld devices for wrinkles, acne and pain which we still make now. And then after a couple of years we started to get into the, the more, more of the professional

2:18 market and started, we built panels for the face that were fully adjustable and started selling them to med spas and spas. And, and now we're in about 50,000 spas, med spas, doctor's offices, that sort of thing. We have a, we have a million plus consumers using our handheld devices every home every night while they're watching television at night getting rid of their wrinkles or acne. And then my son, when My son was 21 years old, which was 14 years ago. Fifteen years ago, we found out that he had dangerously high blood pressure. And we tried everything under the sun. You know, regular medicine, integrative doctors, anti aging doctors, naturopaths, Chinese medicine.

3:09 Nobody could find anything wrong with them. And nothing worked to lower it more than three points. And they, and they told us that his blood pressure was so high he could have a stroke and die at any moment. And, and that was when we decided to build an LED bed. And there really weren't any LED beds that are not that many LED beds on the market at that time. And we didn't know what it would do, but it was kind of our Hail Mary. And, and the bed ended up taking us six years working with, directly with the FDA and millions of dollars to actually perfect it before we put it on the market. But we built something for him in about 60 days. And his blood pressure used to be between 165 and 210 over 110 and 160, like pretty high.

3:58 And, and he laid on this thing three days a week and two months later his blood pressure was 130 over 80. And we're like, what was the, what. Was the, the thought process? And what, what, what kind of cued you in or what article did you read or you know, what doctor was doing something experimentally like maybe there's something here. So, so what I did know at the time is that, is that if you use the right wavelengths, the mitochondria will absorb them and convert it to ATP or adrenosine triphosphate. The, the gasoline of ourselves, basically, and which we produce about 8 to 10% less every decade.

4:40 We're alive after 20. That's why most people don't live beyond 100. And I noticed that he passed out every afternoon around 2:00', clock, like he just had no energy left, nothing. And so I said, let's build this thing. We'll use wavelengths that we know the mitochondria will absorb and convert. And you know the rest of the story. But three years into the six years in development of the bed, working with the FDA, we met a gentleman named Dr. Nathan Bryan, who was part of the discovery team that discovered nitric oxide in the mid-90s. And he came in and visited us and he said the ATP had nothing to do with your son's blood pressure dropping is because this bed is releasing trapped nitric oxide in the body. And nitric oxide will lower high blood pressure. It relaxes the muscle walls of the arteries and gets Blood flow going, that sort of thing. Well, so we were lucky. So let me ask you this. When you talk about. It took you six years to get to the point where you made a device that, that did what then became FDA approved.

5:55 Yeah, yeah. They call it FDA cleared. They approve drugs and they clear devices, same safety and testing. So, you know, as you go through that process, are you looking at. You're not necessarily getting from. For our audience purposes and for mine as well, am I getting. I'm not getting a patent. I'm just getting the right to sell it in a medical court, you know, channel that. Correct. And, and to use claims. Right, right, right. So what took so long there was that when we went. What took so long there? When we went to the FDA and said we wanted to build a bed and we wanted to get it cleared, they basically, the assistant director of the fda, he laughed at me. And he goes, Steve, he goes, he goes, I've known you a long time. I'm just going to save you the heartache. He goes, he goes, don't bother trying to develop an LED bed. Definitely don't write the FDA a check because they don't work. And I'm like, what do you mean they don't work? This is just a larger iteration of, of other clearances that we have because we had built a good relationship with them, because we take all our devices through there with clinical studies and everything that they require.

7:08 And, and he said, well, they're, they're not actually delivering any therapeutic light energy down into muscles and joints and, and organs. They're just lighting up the skin. And this was because of distance. So LED loses its power exponentially as you leave the tip of the bulb. And over the first three years working with them, we basically discovered that if you're further away than three quarters of an inch, there's no possibility of getting depth of penetration. Now, that's different for the face. Like, you could have a panel that's 1 to 3 inches away. And because you're just treating the skin. But when you're, but when you're working with a wellness device, you need to affect positively enough cells that you're actually going to get a change, the measurable change. And, and, and it's a big difference. On the surface, in 1 inch square, you're treating about 19 million cells. And, and, and, and almost their whole job has to do with the skin. If you go down one inch in that one inch square, now you're treating between 465 and 600 million cells that Have a variety of jobs in the body. And, and so that's, that was why they had a big, a lot of attention on penetration. And, and, and so that was. I'm sorry, I just want to pause you, I just want to pause for one second. Explain to me in the audience.

8:33 Your son was, was obviously on the brink of something terrible happening. You kind of hit pause. You built the bed for 60 days. Then what were you, what was your day job before you decided to dedicate your life to this? The reason that you know what detailing a car is is because I opened the first detail shop in the world in 1972. And, and then we franchised and sold 155 franchises across the U.S. got it. I wanted to make sure that everybody knew here they're like, this wasn't. You were not looking for something to do. Like you were busy building a business that was a full time job. And then it was like, hey, life shock, let's figure this out. And then once you figure that, you're like, hey, I gotta release this to the world basically.

9:19 And as big as we became, we're a family run business. My wife is the president of the company. My son that I talked about with that high blood pressure is a COO and he oversees manufacturing and regulatory. And one other thing I can't remember. Well, being basically brand ambassador, it sounds like now. Yep. Yeah. So, okay, so so fast forward back there because I wanted to make sure people knew that, you know, successful entrepreneur stumbles, goes a problem. I'm gonna figure out how to solve it and I'm actually gonna create a business around it, which is the way to solid way to start businesses. Not just haphazardly find something, fix it and then see if it works and then go, thank you. So, so there were three things that we learned from the fda and because of that first one, that was why we built a one sided bed that you flip on and we made it so you're only a quarter inch off the tip of the LED bulb. So we thought we were done with that and can move on to the next barrier to efficacy. But we weren't because what we found was when was that? So we also knew we were going to use LEDs that are emitting light at somewhere between 50 and 50 to 50, 15 and 50 degrees. And if you get wider than that, LED loses its intensity too much. Which is another reason why distance is critical, because the further away you get, the wider that the light gets. Right.

10:41 And but what happened was even though we were quarter inch off the tip of the bulb. And, and we had the right angle of light being emitted from the bulb for penetration. When it hit the acrylic it was going like this would go out to disperse to 180 degrees. My son spent two years working with the four largest manufacturers of acrylics in the, in the country before we, he figured out like they came up with an acrylic that actually let the light through without dispersing it. So now we are getting depth of penetration. The third and biggest barrier is that, and this has to do with the whole legal scene is the FDA has a requirement for a full body device that's in this pain category. And that's what the FDA calls it. They call it pain, they don't call it red light therapy, they don't call it, you know, wellness. And their requirement or their test is raising the tissue temperature of the entire body to between 104 and 111 degrees. Now that sounds really hot and it is really hot when you're outside. But 104 on your skin temperature you would describe as soothing, gentle, relaxing warmth that you just fell asleep to. And, and so the problem with they, they had determined that that was like that's the area of temperature where the

12:11 most benefits happen. So that was the requirement. So if you have a full body device, you need to get that accomplished on the whole body. But what happens, and the reason nobody had ever passed this test before was that when you lay your body on a sheet or a layer of LEDs that's not differentiated in any way, what's going to happen is best case scenario, if you're close, your torso might heat up to that temperature, but your arms and your legs that have way less mass than the torso and dissipate heat almost as fast as you give it to them are never going to come up to that temperature. And they're according to Google, between 58 and 68% of your total body mass.

12:53 So this is, was a really important problem to solve if you're going to tell the public that you're giving them a full body treatment. Well, you would be deceiving them if you, if you weren't right. And so that took three years. And my son came up with this idea of instead of having a sheet of LEDs, we would make 30 separate modules like maybe 6, 7 inches wide and 10 inches long, maybe around 600 LEDs in each module. 30 modules. And inside each module is a special little sensor that we designed and had made for us. And all this stuff's manufactured in our Factory in Irvine, California. And, and so what this sensor does is when, now when you lay on our bed, the within three seconds, the sensor is going to figure out, oh, I've got this.

13:42 I mean, I'm going to. In layman's terms, I've got this arm here. It's got X amount of mass and the temperature of it is X. I need to heat this one module up for this to get it up to the right level. Interesting. Yeah. Computer program is running all 30 of them to bring the whole body up. And, and, and we patented that. Oh, gotcha. And, and, and that kind of. There lies the rub in the existing legal scene, which, if you give me five minutes playing it to you. This is Pete Moore. I want to let you in on a little secret. There's this company called Promotion Vault. And what they do is they give out rewards from retailers that allow you to incentivize your members without having to do zero down and one month free or giving away shakes or giving away T shirts. What you want to do is build a rewards program that lasts, that people value and that doesn't discount your own products and services.

14:42 So here's the deal. There's something called Rewards Vault. The Rewards Vault is going to allow a member to set up their own profile. They are going to answer questions, you are going to get those answers, you're going to be able to target those members and you're going to reward them inside your club, inside your spa, and outside of the club and outside of the spa to get them to become loyal, to get them to pay their monthly dues and to be rewarded properly for the actions. A lot of companies are cutting back on rewards. You shouldn't be. Promotion Vault, your answer, trust me, this is real. Well, let me, let me ask you this question. So first off, congratulations on what you built and, you know, and for also, you know, curing your son, which obviously something bad was bound to happen. And I'm sure you've had billions, if not hundreds of thousands of people, you know, life saved. So congratulations on that being like a part of the Halo community and impactful. You know, when you see other people come out into the market and they have a copycat product and, you know, 100% that, look, this product is not doing shit for you. They have not complied. They don't have the science, they don't off the right materials, you, you could go and you can spend a lot of money legally to try and shut somebody down and you realize it's just going to pop up again. You Know, in, out of an Asian plant or out of somewhere in Korea or India's what, what have you. How do you think about that as an entrepreneur? And my reason for asking is a lot of people

16:15 try and protect their patents. A lot of trying. People like protect the efficacy of their channel. And a lot of times it's like, you know what, I'm just going to kind of swim through it. I'm going to tell everyone what my brand means and I'm going to outspend people on what, what the effect is. And then everyone's going to know that lights them is the quality brand. And I'm not going to like spend money on legal teams. I'm going to spend money on my product, my brand. How do you think about that? Well, exactly that way. Okay, good. We, yeah, we. First off, the Federal Trade Commission is, is doing the job for us. In April of 23, they put out a warning letter to the health and wellness industry and basically said, you guys are duping the public with unsubstantiated claims and we're coming after you. We're not only coming after you, but already we have targeted, investigated and penalized fines, that sort of thing. 670 companies. Wow. So they're. Yeah, so they're pretty on it. And then, and then six months ago, one of the largest law firms in the U. S. King and Spalding, a. Buddy runs the Atlanta office, Josh Cayman, give a shout out right now. Oh, okay.

17:30 They, they, they did a white paper slash opinion letter. Yes. And, and basically they, they re, they reviewed the exemption that, that everybody in the full body device business is, is under about four and a half years ago when all this stuff came on the market. And, and they, and they, they basically said like nobody read this exemption. Everybody thinks that, that they're just exempt and that they could just put the product on the market and make whatever claims. But it actually says that you have to, you have to do the same tests and pass the same test as, as we did getting through FDA clearance and you just don't have to submit them to the fda. So you don't have to spend millions of dollars in the six years that we, we spent that sort of thing. And, and, but the problem is none of them have that technology and can't pass that test. So, so just so I understand what you're saying is you can go to market, you can make claims. However, if we audit you, you're getting audited, you better have the backup for it. Is that what you're saying? They, they have to have performed the test and have them in a folder. And here's my stuff. I dotted my eyes, I crossed my T's. Okay. But it's only, only if. Only if the, if the crossing guard comes to your corner is what you basically say. Well, no, not.

18:53 So here's the rub. Yes. Federal. The, the, the class action lawsuit firms in 23. When the, when the FTC put out that warning letter, saw that and went, that's low hanging fruit. We could go after these guys now. And we've got the government behind us. They actually came at us first. Okay. Like they attacked us first. And, but we had all our paperwork in line and, and they, they actually asked me if I'd be a consultant. I said no, no, no. Got it. Okay. Okay. So you're telling me that the lawyers came after the companies, not the government? Well, the government did and is continuing. But the scary thing, like the reason that you don't want to just, you know, you don't want to be in this marketplace and not have all your ducks in a row legally, is when the class action lawsuit firms come after you, it's not a fun deal. Yeah, yeah.

19:55 Costing them way more money than they are making off of their business. Yeah, we've dealt with that in the, in the health club industry a lot with wage an hour claims. And I get, I've seen standard letters from any of my clients. It seems like they just get their name put on it in a mail merge. I think it's called mail merge and word. Yeah, it's really authentic. So, you know, as you take a look at your products and the cost that it costs per bed to put into all these bed spas. What is, where's the financing market for that? Do you provide financing with it? Just, just give us a little idea of how these things proliferate, you know, and how people can get a hold of them. Well, because we have so many franchises that we're supplying and, and they have so many locations, they're able to get way, way, way better pricing than the, the 50 to $55,000 for an LED bed or $4,500 for a panel for the face because it's such large volume. So we're able to buy our components much, much cheaper and we can take advantage of manufacturing processes and that sort of thing that, that with volume and. But in addition to that, we do have, we have financing programs for them. We have leasing programs for them.

21:23 I would say. Yeah, yeah. Most of them just pay. Got it. And then, and then my last question Is out of all of your locations that you service, what is the most amount of light stem beds that someone has in one single location? I'm, I, I might, I, I, I feel like I might violate NDAs. Oh, okay, okay. But is there, are there places where it's like, hey, the equivalent of like a, like a small Pilates studio where people basically have so many of these beds because there's so much demand that it's basically like, it's kind of like the primary reason people are going, I, I, I could something like that without, without being, I mean, look, we could try to get everyone to sign NDA, but I actually have a reasonable amount of listeners now, so it's going to take a little while to get this thing launched. I'm just kidding.

22:16 I can tell you who is, I can tell you who's going at this very strongly, really wants to be in the recovery space in their gyms and is basically not fooling around. They're going for it. And that would be anytime Fitness. They're doing a really good job. This is Pete Moore. Here's the last tip for you of the podcast. We are partnered up with a company called higher dose higherdose.com they are the leader in workout recovery products. Infrared technology, LED light masks, neck enhancers, and other products such as PEMF mats and sauna blankets. If you have not gotten on the workout recovery train yet, your time and your stop is now. You got to get these products in there before these workout recovery and spas end up saturating your market.

23:15 Having your members walk out of the club and going into one of their locations for 200 bucks per month where they're paying 39 to you. Let's become an expert in workout recovery. If we are already an authority in workouts, Higher Dose, check it out. There's a wholesale code and we look forward to helping you augment your products and services to meet the demands of your members. And hey, let's get people happy, healthy and sweating. And the recovery should be just as. Good as the workout. Well, look, I look forward to meeting with you. We got to keep these around 20, 25 minutes, keep the audience really tight, and we'll have all the information up on lightstim. We Are there any trade shows that you're going to that people should know about where they could find you guys?

24:05 And you know, tomorrow we're leaving for. Vegas, the IEC sc, which is a huge spa and med spa trade show, the biggest one in the country, actually be there this, this weekend. I think it's at the. The new convention center. Gotcha. Well, we'll get this out and actually have a couple of people that are going to be there. I'll have get in touch with you that we work with. So it'd be great. I love that. Love it. If we could do another one, I'd love to tell you my Saquon Barkley story. Okay. Oh, yeah, let's do that now. Let's do that. Okay. Being an avid Giant fan and I have to toggle to the. To the Eagles every once in a while, mostly because of Saquon and because of Brian Mitchell, Ashton Mitchell, Riley Mitchell A. Mitchell, and Eric Cassberry.

24:49 Steve, you're opening for Saquon. So about two years ago, Saquon suffered, when he was playing for the Giants, suffered a high ankle sprain. And at the time, there were nine games left in the season, I think, and, and basically everybody said, well, he's done for the season and nobody's going to come back from a high ankle sprain that quickly. And running back. And I flew him a bed to his home in New Jersey like within two days, three days. And he did like three to four hours a day on the bed and instead of missing all those games, walks back on the field two weeks later and sets a personal record of 206 yards.

25:31 Nice. If we win that game. I'm not even sure we didn't win many games that year, but we were all Saquon fans no matter what. Are you a Giant fan? I have no time for sports. I'm working seven days a week. This is what we do. We'll send you a copy of our time to win again book, which is basically running your company like a sports team. Sounds like you do that already and keep it in the family. So lightsdim. Everybody here probably seen it now. You know it. Steve, congrats on what you built and for helping thousands of people. And we're really bullish on the med spa space, so I think you're going to be a key component of it. Go forward and we'll also try and help you protect your technology because that's what we like to do here at the Square.

26:15 Thanks for all that. Thanks for having me on. Was really fun. All right, man, take care. We'll see you soon in person. All right. All right, take care.