When you've had warts like me and have had them removed, you tend to examine every face before you and see the dozen or so warts in them. My father had warts on his face, neck, and body as far as I could see, so I inherited them. I had them removed in the early 90s through cauterization, and I tell you I didn't like the results at all. Not only did they grow back; they left at least one keloid on my face and another on my hand.
So I'd been waiting for a better way of removing warts from my face, neck and body. Since then, there's been laser, but I've always been careful to avoid high-tech tools on my body since I fear their after-effects. Lo, what do you know, some months ago I heard about Amazing Touch on one of our television channels. The report said that it was invented by a Filipino, so I was more than glad to try it out.
And now I'm recommending it to all my friends. As my granddaughter would say, "It's good, I tell you, it's good!"
At Amazing Touch, they don't gouge out your warts, moles and other skin abnormalities. They gently open the pores that host them, then place a potent cream made from cashew nut oil into those pores. You feel the sting, but nothing more. And you get three rounds of treatments, roughly a week apart, plus a last check-up to guarantee total removal of your skin abnormalities in the area you contracted (face and neck, front and back, genitals, and I suppose arms, legs and hands). The claim is that the warts will never grow back in those same exact places where they've already been dislodged. Moreover, the product has won several international awards.
I got the picture
above out of their website. They sell the kit alone, or together with their services. Balikbayans who don't have a month, or two hours a week for four weeks in the Philippines, are usually given instructions on use of the kit so that they can do it themselves when they get back to their posts abroad.
The inventor, whose name is Rolando de la Cruz, was a once a barber. While still a child, he said, he happened to bite into the juicy part of a cashew nut and felt a burning sensation in his mouth. His mother explained that casuy burns. And so, when he was already a barber and heard his client say that he had had his warts burned through cauterization, he put two and two together and tried casuy on the warts of his customers. It worked. That must have been in 1970. Since then, Mr. De la Cruz has been smart enough to consult doctors and pharmacologists at the U.P. College of Medicine, coming up with a product that can cure even skin cancer.
That was how RCC Amazing Touch was established in 1997 with consultants mainly from the Philippine General Hospital. Now in all major SM malls, it has recently been offering franchises for a cool P1.5 million.
Critique
The product is truly amazing; I've tried it myself at my own expense, so I'm being very honest about it. But precisely because I'm a paying customer, I can tell you frankly where the problem lies.
All is well with the product, and services too, but the pricing system is crazy. Having tried it at Megamall, where the services of Snooky and Mila (my tukayo) were superb, I did a little investigation at SM North, where I knew the owner was stationed. It was there I was able to interview him. However, when I asked for a whole-body estimate, the pretty girl whom I found out later was his daughter-in-law charged me a whopping P88,000.00! Despite the inventor's hinting that I could get a 20 percent discount, the offer didn't sound enticing at all.
Thing is, I got everything at Megamall for a much lower price--and even that price went up a little higher when they started overestimating my blessings.
What's the lesson here? When you're into business, especially when you're already into franchising, you've got to find a methodical and consistent way of estimating costs, and therefore prices. Don't do socialized pricing, or pricing based on emotions, least of all pricing based on greed! Otherwise, no matter how good your product is, you might end up in the dust bin of business history.
Isn't that where so many Filipino products have ended up, for precisely the same reason?
Greed, I mean.
