The story of how one little massage turned into a decade-long love affair
The inspiration for Melt began the day friends of mine asked me to give them a few hints for massaging their girlfriends. We were sitting around at brunch, and my mates were complaining that they always got sore hands, they didn’t know if they were doing it right, they got bored after five minutes. I showed them a thing or two. The next time I saw them, their girlfriends were raving. “Whatever you did,” they said, “you should bottle that. The massages are amazing!” My first satisfied customers.
I got to work trialling some specific massage techniques I thought would work for couples. But there was one problem. I didn’t have a girlfriend myself to try them out on. I did, however, have my eye on Emma. We were good friends and there was a lot of flirting going on, but no one had made any moves. I asked Emma over for a massage and explained to her what I was trying to achieve. It was supposed to be a little sexy, I told her, but I also promised that it would go no further than the back rub.
We sat down for that first massage using The Melt Set Up (now an important part of my teaching method) and it was amazing. There were sparks flying between us the whole time, it was undeniably hot.
We stopped after the massage, no lines had been crossed… but the sexual tension didn’t end with the massage. We couldn’t ignore it. As Emma says it, she threw herself at me later that night… and the rest is history.
For a long time after that, Melt remained our private massage routine, I decided it was better just as our secret routine, I didn’t entertain sharing it with the public. My company, Merkas Health was in rapid growth, I was super focused. My goal was to produce Melbourne best massage practitioners and I spent most of my time training staff and expanding the company.
The first versions of Melt were far too sexy and couldn’t be taught to a class. After a year of fooling around with Melt in our own relationship, treating each other to massage after massage, Emma and I discussed the idea of sharing Melt with other couples. I began stripping it back and “cleaning” the routine up. We wanted something we could teach comfortably in a group setting, and we decided that whatever happened behind closed doors was up to the couples. We’d just give them the right tools for a fantastic massage. We ran our first class with friends and family attending. This was a test to see if it was awkward or too weird to teach in a group setting. It wasn’t. We had something we could release. So we started selling our live workshops.
As the years went by, the workshops started booking out. We added more classes, teaching over 100 people in a day. I kept refining the routines and techniques based on feedback, making it better and better every time. Finding simpler solutions couples can use to make their massage more effective. The feedback we were getting from the workshops was phenomenal. It was time to give the world a chance to play with Melt, not just Australia…
In February 2014, eight years after our first workshops, we hopped onto a plane and made our way to Los Angeles to shoot our teachings onto video so we could share them with the rest of the world through online streaming technology.
The Melt videos are a combination of luck, faith and extremely hard work – we knew the techniques were good, but the whole video thing could have turned out so cheesy. It could have turned out so bad. We’ve all seen those awkward, hideous massage videos on YouTube. With all that oil and flesh, it’s so easy to get it wrong. But it turned out exactly the way we envisioned it, thanks to the amazing team of people we engaged for the shoot.
Now Melt is impacting the lives of couples from all over the world. Each month, hundreds and hundreds of couples purchase Melt to use in their own relationships. They write to us to tell us how its helped them – more intimacy, deeper connections, stronger trust… We know its a small thing but we also know its a proven thing: Massage changes couples relationships. We’re helping in one small way, as one happy customer put it, to bring a little more love to people’s lives. We couldn’t be happier or more proud.
