We bought the Kahuna SM7300 massage chair on February 2019. After using it for 9 months, I wanted to share my thoughts – pros and cons. FYI – as of 9/3/2021, Amazon is selling it for $2,899 plus tax. As of this date, we still use our chair at least 3 times per week and we have not had any mechanical issues with it. We love it!
I rambled a lot on the video as I was getting a massage at the same time as the review, so I hope the following transcript is helpful. It’s not an exact word for word transcript, but it’s close.
I just want to take you on a little test drive of the Kahuna massage chair the SM-7300, show you how it works and get a nice massage at the same time.
I’m gonna turn it on – what I like to do is I like to hit the button that says “zero” down here in the bottom middle and it takes me backwards. It’s not really zero gravity but there’s a button on the bottom right hand side that will give you a little bit more if you hold it down and that will take you as far back as the chair will go, which is much better than the zero.
I’m going to put it on Menu and I’m going to choose one of the Auto options. I’m going to go with Stretching and there’s four different options under Stretching: there’s Yoga Stretching, Active Stretching, SV-Chiro Stretch and Dynamic Stretch.
My favorite at the moment is the Dynamic Stretch, so I’m gonna choose that one, and it’s going to go to town on me. You can push your legs down and push your feet down and you can stretch out a little bit more. I put it back but it’s gonna start stretching me, it’s gonna pull my legs down and the airbags are going to inflate and the little roller things are going to roll on the bottom of my feet, which is pretty darn nice. My hands are inside these little things that are going to squeeze down on my hands.
Air bags are everywhere and there’s air bags that are pushing my shoulders down at the moment.
As we speak this thing is either tapping or knocking, I can’t remember which, and it goes all the way up to the middle of my skull, it usually stops right at the base of my skull, but maybe I stretched my neck up a little farther. Normally, it doesn’t go that far.
Anyways, it’s doing like a tapping/knocking thing on me right now. Now it’s kneading, I like kneading, it feels really good.
The airbags are inflating around my legs at the moment, and the the hip bags are also inflating so they’re pushing on my hips, which is really nice.
This chair gets a little rough with you on the automatic modes, you can put it in Manual mode and just do specific parts of your back or your lower back or your hips. It just rolls up and down. It’s an L track but you can just do manual things.
I like some of the things that the auto functions do. I can’t do some of the things that the auto functions do in the manual mode, so sometimes you got to take the rough with the smooth.
It’s going down my upper back, oh my gosh it’s so good. The legs are getting stretched, my shoulders are getting pushed down by the airbags. The bags for my hands haven’t inflated yet; those are pretty cool.
They do have these little rubber dots in here in the hand area, so when you’re done with your massage you’ve got all these little indents on your hands, it’s kind of funny. Ir’s supposed to do a pressure point massage.
These automatic massages go for 20 minutes. The manual – if you put it on manual and you do choose some of the different massage options, in manual you can go ten minutes up to thirty minutes at a time. They don’t recommend going more than thirty minutes.
The first day we got this chair I kind of went overboard and I did two 20-minute massages back-to-back and I had bruises at the base of my spine and yeah, that did not feel good!
So just watch that you don’t overdo it, because it’s a very intense massage. There are pieces of padding that come with the chair but you have to make sure you put them in. There’s extra pads for the bottom of your feet and there’s an extra pad that goes behind my back. If you just lay on top of the rollers without that extra padding, you will get bruised. I bruised the bottom of my feet because I didn’t have the little pads in, so just a warning for that.
This is one of the lower end models; it’s not the lowest – it’s like the mid-range model. When we bought it, it was $2,700 and we got it brand new on eBay directly from the company and that was with free shipping and back then eBay didn’t charge tax.
Amazon also has it and I think theirs was $20 more for the same exact chair from the same exact company, so apparently and so Amazon charges the company a little more to sell them on there? I’m not sure (this is no longer true as of December 2019 – the chair on eBay is now more expensive than on Amazon).
Some friends of ours have a chair that’s three times this price and yeah, it’s fabulous theirs has Bluetooth music and it talks to them and things like that.
I just wanted a massage; I wanted to decide when I wanted it, so if I wanted massage at 2:00 in the morning I could get that.
This is good. If you’ve got more money to spend on those higher-end massage chairs great, but this one does pretty much everything, I think. I mean probably not everything, but I get a foot massage which I can never get enough with foot massages.
It’s not a perfect foot massage; it’s not a human being doing the massage. You have to sacrifice the human being part, but it’s the fact that you have the freedom to have the massage when you want it. You don’t have to make an appointment; you just hop in the chair and go.
The other thing to watch out for is when you’re using the chair (if you decide to get one) make sure you take off any bulky jewelry like watches or rings because when these hand airbags inflate, everything’s going to push down and it’s going to really hurt if you have watches or rings or something on that is bulky, so take off all your jewelry.
Keep your socks on, you don’t need shoes or slippers on this. You really want a foot massage, so just have your socks on. If you wear blue jeans or some thicker material like sweatshirts or something, your massage might not be as intense which may be a good thing if you’re very sensitive.
This chair isn’t for fragile people, I can guarantee that. If you feel like you’ve got brittle bones or something – nah, I wouldn’t use this.
The hip airbags when they inflate – that just feels good. Pretty much everything feels good; I mean some of the tapping and knocking things that they do on your back – sometimes it gets really intense.
When you first start out with this chair, it’s gonna feel pretty rough to you, but it gets better once you get used to it, you know, do it a couple of times a week.
I don’t recommend getting massage every day like I did when I first started out, because yes, you will get bruises. Three or four times a week, like every other day is pretty good. Give yourself time to recover. When you get a massage, you need a bit of recovery time.
I was kind of greedy, I was trying to try out all the different functions on the chair, and so uh yeah that kind of hurt.
Do not get in this chair drunk.
I can say that I’ve had a couple of drinks and gotten into it and I usually fall asleep in the middle of a massage. Even when it’s tapping and knocking, I actually fell asleep. It’s not a bad thing, but alcohol dehydrates you and massages push toxins out of your tissues.
They do tell you to drink a lot of water after you have a massage when you go for a regular massage. So if you’re drunk and you get in the chair you’re really REALLY dehydrating yourself getting a massage on top of that. So try not to drink and massage! I mean you don’t really want to be drunk when you go and get a real human massage.
Drink a lot of water after you have your massage in the chair. Enjoy the massage and if you fall asleep, that’s great. I’ve read reviews where people complain that the chair when it stops, it just stops in the position it’s in; it doesn’t put you back on the ground. To me, that’s a good thing that it doesn’t put you back on the ground when it’s done, because I do fall asleep in the chair, so I don’t want it waking me up if I’m having a nice nap.
All you have to do is turn the remote back on and turn it off and it will put you down on the ground. It’s a nice feature – you don’t get that option when you go to a real massage therapist. They get you out of there and on to the next client.
The Dynamic Stretch does move you around quite a bit. I started in the way back position and it’s taking me up and down, grabbing my legs and pulling down a little bit to give me a stretch.
It’s doing like a knocking and tapping thing on me right now.
For what you get with this chair, it’s a really good price.
Other chairs I researched in this price range didn’t have a foot massager built in.
Some didn’t have as many airbags; the L track massage is not included on some of the lower priced chairs.
The company (https://www.kahunachair.com/) is very responsive if you message them with questions, they get right back to you.
The chair is delivered through a trucking company. It comes in two huge heavy boxes.
My husband and I put it together. You can pay more for White Glove service and have the company representatives come and set it up for you. It took my husband and myself probably two hours to put it together.
The company has a video on YouTube that will show you step by step how to put it together. There’s printed instructions and a little booklet that you get, but the video is much better at helping you put it together. If you’re a do it yourselfer like we are, it’s just easier. We know we put it together, so we know if we screwed it up or not.
You can pay extra for the White Glove Service. I’ve heard some customers say they had a bad white glove experience. The white glove people that showed up didn’t know how to put the chair together, so they were kind of winging it. I’ve also heard that most of the customers had a great white glove experience.
Don’t be afraid if you’re handy with putting things together; I feel it’s kind of a two-person job because when you attach the leg part to the body of the chair, it’s kind of heavy, so it’s just easier with two people.
I’ve heard of people putting them together by themselves, but it’s just easier with two people to put it together.
I can’t think of anything else, so I’m just gonna lay back and relax and let this thing stretch me and air bag me and I’ll put more notes in down below in the YouTube description – links to the chair and things like that.
Any questions you have, just ask me and I’ll do my best to answer them, but I think I’ll just close my eyes and relax for a while (that didn’t last long, I thought of a lot more things to say!).
The remote will tell you how much time you have left up in the corner and right now I have five minutes left, so I want to tell you a little more about what’s going on here.
One of the drawbacks of this remote is that you don’t have an option to save favorite things. If you find things in the Manual settings that you really like, it’s probably better if you just have a little cheat sheet that you keep next to you. It doesn’t take long to go into the settings and set up your favorite things, you just can’t save them.
You have to go in and program them in each and every time, for example, how long you want your massage to last or what parts you want to massage, if you want specific things like you want it to massage your lower back – that’s something you have to program in.
Some people find this to be a pain, but like I said – for the price of the chair versus the ones that have the memory in the remote, you know you’re getting a deal. This is what we could afford at the time, so I’m okay with that. I like most of the pre-programmed things anyways, so it’s not that big of a deal for me.
I’ve tried the manual settings but I like the pre-programmed massages.
When I first started using this chair, I had some crooked toes (they’re still crooked). This chair found my flaws, and when the airbags squeezed around my feet, I was having a really hard time with it. It was so painful and my little toes would just be so sore afterwards.
Now that I’ve been using the massage chair for awhile, my body either adjusted to it or something, but my feet don’t hurt anymore.
This chair is gonna bring out some feelings in your body that you didn’t know you had, like it’s gonna make you aware of things that are crooked or whatever.
We’ve had this chair since February 2019 and now it’s November 2019; things in my body don’t hurt like they did when we first got it, so I think it’s working out the kinks.
My body really craves this chair when I’m having a rough day – it’s quite addicting to feel good.
Don’t hesitate to ask me questions about this chair. You can contact the company, too – like I said they are very responsive. I’m not associated with the company; I’m just a customer giving up my personal review.
Some days when I’m not feeling so great, I have to say this chair beats me up pretty hard, but I still like it. Some people say it doesn’t massage all the way up – this thing just went right up to the top of my head! For the record – I’m five feet five inches tall, and about 164 pounds. My husband is six feet two inches and weighs about 204 pounds.
I’ve heard the chair fits people from five feet one inch up to six feet five inches and they get a decent massage out of it.
So that’s it – it’s going through its automatic cycle. That was 20 minutes, thanks for hanging in here if you hung in here with me.
It just leaves me up in the air, so I’m gonna hit the On/Off button again to turn it back on, then hit it one more time. It’s gonna turn off on its own and take me back down to the level where I can get out of this chair.
Thanks for watching!