About Us

Theraply is a tech health and wellness company in Singapore. Our journey began in 2000 when the founder Valerie De Costa first set up shop within Peace Centre located at Selegie Road as Nouriskin a beauty salon. A few years later in 2009 the company changed its name to Nouri Face & Body Concepts and began making its mark on the prenatal and postnatal pregnancy services industry as the first ever company to offer the traditional jamu treatments combined with modern technology. Success came along soon enough thanks to the secret formula of jamu recipes and massage techniques passed down from generation to generation in Valeries maternal side of her family.

After years of dominating the pregnancy care space as a leader in service quality and results the market opened up to plenty of similar providers and masseuse freelancers who adopted the unethical practices of hard-selling packages using aggressive and dishonest tactics and the majority of them did not even produce any results for the customers who paid them exorbitant amounts of money. As more cases of this nature surfaced on the local news and social media and the amounts of those parties affected and dissatisfied customers coming to Nourifbc to get their well deserved pregnancy care needs met increased significantly the founders of NouriFBC took notice of this but were at a loss of how help future consumers avoid such problems from other companies.

The Bigger Picture

It wasnt until late 2018-shortly after we had won the Beauty Insiders Best post natal massage award that the founders of the company discussed and collectively agreed on a few points :

The labour crunch of the service industry led to rising operational costs in staff salaries for companies resulting in a lot of them pressuring their therapists and sales staff to aggressively push packages to customers wasnt going away anytime soon.

These unethical companies gave our entire industry and our brand a bad name to uninformed consumers. Our research from attending the popular baby fairs or road shows yielded interesting insights such as competitors were using low priced one-time only single sessions to lure and trap customers into signing expensive packages they didnt need and they were copying a lot of the massage steps and techniques we started years ago and some were even bad mouthing us to interested attendees when being compared to them at these events.

The emergence of less-than-capable freelance therapists undercutting the market was making a negative impact on the health of new mothers because the more customers a solo freelancer has the likelihood of that freelancer being able to give her customers consistent quality in results would be unlikely. And the more referral sales a freelancer had other companies would engage and deploy more promotional gimmicks to entice customers. The customers are the only ones that stand to lose out.

The most important fact of all is that starting a family in Singapore is becoming increasingly expensive and difficult. So much that the national birth rate in the last year was the lowest ever in the past 8 years with couples citing costs as the main obstacle.

And when they finally do start a family the modern Singaporean woman has difficulties practicing the old traditional confinement period practices as well as diligently adhering to the traditional style of confinement food choices.

Every other company focused on selling fixed packages which made their staff treat potential customers who couldnt afford multiple sessions as less important or not worth their time. This led to a lot of lower income couples and single mothers with less purchasing power to go without proper pregnancy care out of fear of being embarrassed or being treated less fairly by these companies. This something that we really felt strongly opposed to because we came from humble beginnings ourselves when we started this business nearly 20 years ago.

These ‘packages’ offered by a lot of other companies didn’t match up to expectations in quality results and it became just another way for sales persons to meet their targets. Almost every ‘package’ that we did research on had an increased number of sessions in them just to justify the selling price. This is highly unethical to us and our brand will never do that.