Victor Rico said he never second-guessed whether becoming an owner of a massage therapy business was a sound decision last year, when he secured a loan in May 2020 to buy what is now Harmony Falls Massage Clinic in Woodstock.

“I never thought for one second we would have a hard time because of this pandemic,” Rico said.

He expressed confidence although when he closed on the loan to buy the business, which had been run by two other massage therapists with a slightly different name before, COVID-19 restrictions had personal services like massage providers, barber shops and salons shut down.

“We thought, ‘Well, we might have another few weeks before we can open our doors anyway,’” Rico said. “We made it look nicer, hired some new therapists. We do a lot of training. We got so lucky right off the bat. We found five therapists looking for work in these crazy times. It was a blessing.”

He said business was sluggish at first, but it has grown twofold from 200 massages a month to 400 since, and he saw almost no slowdown this fall as the delta variant of COVID-19 helped fuel the latest spike in caseloads, including in Illinois.

“It was really slow starting off in June. But it was OK because we were brand new,” Rico said. “This location was [previously] owned by two other therapists. They only had their own clientele. They weren’t working on new people all the time. The business was slow. We’ve doubled it since.”

He is far from alone in seeing massages ascend from the low levels experienced when the pandemic first struck, even as the health crisis ramped up over the past three months, hospitalizing more in the McHenry and Lake county region than previous surges.

In fact, only 10% of massage therapists said they were still not working last month, according to the Evanston-based American Massage Therapy Association, a nonprofit industry group.

It found 86% of massage therapists said they had stopped working in April 2021, but in September 2021, more than 90% said they were back at work.

“While the massage industry was hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, this community has once again shown that the industry will bounce back,” the association said on a web page reporting the latest massage therapy industry trends.

TLC Massage in Crystal Lake saw clients slowly return after personal services were allowed to return last year in June, and then it slowly grew until after December, when the pace picked up more rapidly, manager Kimberly Petersen said.

“It was slow to start. But it just built up. After Christmas time, it started to get really busy. And we’ve kind of been busy ever since,” Petersen said.

The latest surge made little impact in terms of demand TLC’s services, she said.

“Definitely being down those two months or so last year, it was very hard. But I would say that we’ve gotten back on track,” Petersen said.

She theorized that the difficult changes to many lives caused by the pandemic may have changed how people prioritize self-care and raised demand for massages and other personal services.

Some have been more actively looking for ways to relieve the stress of unemployment, loneliness from lockdowns and supervising kids in remote learning situations or quarantines away from in-person classes, she said.

“People have really learned during the pandemic to take care of themselves and do things for themselves to help stay healthy. And massage is one of those things. With COVID-19, it has caused so much anxiety in everyone and I think people find that getting a massage is a very good way to take care of themselves,” Petersen said.