StyleSeat: Our Story and Vision
StyleSeat has been making waves recently - both in the press as well as with our strong community growth since our May launch. As we start to become more of a force in the beauty world I want to talk a bit about our vision and how we plan on shaping the industry.
I started StyleSeat because I was frustrated that I couldn’t find and book a hair stylist online. I then realized beauty professionals weren’t empowered in their businesses either - there weren’t any good, free tools for them to manage their day-to-day or to help them take an active role in growing their businesses (which, collectively, happen to earn $40 billion a year in the US alone). I discovered that beauty professionals are savvy entrepreneurs who are passionate about making people feel good and determined to be successful doing it. Silicon Valley had completely ignored the industry, and the opportunity to make a difference was very clear.
Pitching a “hair startup” in Silicon Valley wasn’t the easiest. (There are a lot of bald venture capitalists out there, y’all.) I was told that beauty/wellness wasn’t a “serious industry,” that “these professionals wouldn’t use the internet to grow” and that StyleSeat would be a “lifestyle business” - not a real company. But my co-founder Dan and I knew that underestimating beauty professionals was a big mistake and that by empowering and connecting them we could start a movement that could help them make a lot more money. We invested most of our own savings into building the initial site ourselves and were then able to recruit some of the most elite investors who understood and were excited by our vision.
The purpose of StyleSeat today is to let any beauty/wellness professional bring their business online for free with simple but powerful tools: schedule management, client tracking, online booking, custom statistics, business education, mobile tools and their own professional web site. They can also access additional tools to really grow revenue starting at just $25/month. Clients are empowered too; they can search, browse photos and recommendations, see where their friends go and easily book at their convenience - all completely free.
The professionals using StyleSeat are killing it. In the short time since our launch we already support over 14,000 businesses, 50,000 clients and have managed more than $3.5 million in appointment bookings - and this is just the start. The numbers are reflecting what we’ve known all along - that beauty professionals are entrepreneurs and that we can help them grow their business.
The average beauty professional makes $27,000 a year but is only booked 70% of the time. That means they have the potential to make an additional $11,500 per year on average - that’s powerful, especially in these economic times. And it means StyleSeat has the potential to redirect $12 billion of spend to our professionals. Not bad for a lifestyle business.
As StyleSeat’s platform grows, so will the benefits for our users. We’ll apply new commerce models to maximize revenue for professionals and convenience for clients. We’ll leverage learnings across our entire network to provide customized business growth recommendations and we’ll partner with organizations who have the ability to grow revenue for our professionals on a massive scale. And when other internet companies release “the next hot thing” for small businesses, StyleSeat will know which ones are valuable and connect our community with them immediately.
The point of all this is to underline that I’m excited that we’ve taken our first steps towards our vision, and have plans for massive disruption in the coming months. We have a few exciting announcements we’ll be making and a lot of beautiful product rolling out in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more hotness.
I want to thank the StyleSeat team for tirelessly moving mountains every day, as well as our community of professionals for all of their brilliant feedback, support and guidance. We’re proving that Beauty and Wellness is a powerful industry and that together we can build a stylish and profitable future.
xo,
CEO, StyleSeat
