You can get a full-body massage, a facial, or an acupuncture session in almost any major city. But what happens when an itch hits a spot your own hands simply cannot reach? Most people just deal with it. Zhang Xiaoqiao saw a multi-million-dollar opportunity instead.
Operating out of Shenzhen, China, 32-year-old Zhang runs a chain called Suma. The core offering is shockingly simple. Customers lie face down on specialized beds while trained attendants use custom-designed tools to scratch their backs and hard-to-reach spots. It costs roughly 300 yuan, or about Rs 3,700 to Rs 4,200, for a single hour. Skeptics laughed when the first store opened in the Baoan District, but the math tells a different story. His two outlets pull in a combined gross monthly revenue of around 100,000 yuan, which translates to roughly Rs 14 lakh.
The concept didn't drop out of thin air. Zhang tried his hand at seven different jobs in a single year after college, dabbled in cross-border e-commerce, and worked in self-media without seeing massive success. The breakthrough moment happened when he scrolled past a viral video of a woman scratching her husband's back. The comment section was flooded with people saying they would happily pay an outsider to do the exact same thing. That sparked a memory of his own childhood in Hubei province, where his father's back-scratching routinely helped him drift off to sleep.
There was no playbook for this. No established professional itch-scratching association existed, so Zhang had to build the training methods and techniques from scratch. Workers learn how to apply precise pressure using specialized pointed tools that mimic fingernails without breaking the skin.
Urban burnout drives the customer base. High-stress environments in first-tier tech and financial hubs leave corporate workers searching for strange forms of physical decompression. About 70 percent of Suma's clientele are men. Many repeat visitors claim the targeted scratching provides a nervous system release that standard, heavy-pressure massages fail to match. It triggers a wave of deep relaxation, sometimes ending in involuntary laughter when technicians hit particularly sensitive nerve endings.
Doubters online still question the economics. Critics argue that paying the price of a fine dining meal just to get an itch relieved is peak consumer absurdity. Yet, the business has crossed its break-even threshold and turned profitable.
Zhang isn't stopping at two storefronts. His long-term roadmap targets 100 locations across the country, aiming to legitimize itch-scratching as a mainstream wellness category. Whether the model can scale beyond a viral novelty remains to be seen, but right now, thousands of stressed city workers are proving that relief is worth paying top dollar for.
