introducing glow
Glow, a beauty booking and community app for genz.
How we got here
Glow began with a horrific hair experience. I am a natural blonde and walked out of a nyc salon on to my shock, a brunette. After several traumatic beauty experiences in NYC, I created a google doc of my favorite salons in nyc.
When Renee, my co-founder, joined my dev team and coincidentally moved to my neighborhood in 2018 — I passed along this google doc within the first three minutes of meeting her. I couldn’t let her navigate the NYC beauty minefield alone.
Over the next two years we kept revisiting this doc, and in 2020 we productized this google doc and launched glow.
Why we started
The beauty service space is one of the last marketplace frontiers to be digitized (we are outsourcing the rest of our personal services on apps — whether it be uber for transportation, seamless for food, or classpass fitness) except it isn’t being done for the beauty vertical.
The big shareholders of this market such as Mindbody, Vagaro, and Styleseat were all tailored toward fitting the needs of salon, not the consumer.
Gaps in the beauty service market
With the consumer in mind, we realized the massive gaps in the beauty service space were not just felt by us but by thousands of others.
We surveyed 1600 genz and discovered that:
- 85% of people are still calling salons to book beauty
- It is so stressful for consumers to have scattered beauty booking software
- a lot of time is wasted digging through random reviews from strangers on yelp, not to mention wasted money
- It’s anxiety-provoking for gen-zs to call salons — genzs in a time where we didnt have landline phones, so this is very foreign to them
Championing the salon
Salons were hit SO hard by covid. We aren’t here to take a back breaking commission. We want to be salon superfans, and for their salon to be beautifully highlighted on glow — and will do whatever it takes, whether it is going into the salon to capture a few shots, or polish their menu.
- 31% of nyc salons and spas do not have a digital footprint
- 74% of the market consists of small, local salons — that have limited $ for marketing
We put a strong emphasis on championing the small salon and spa business owners by giving them a digital presence. Glow stack studio offers a wide range of tech and marketing services to bring small salon merchants online.
Our product
Launching glow in the highly competitive world of America’s salons was no easy feat. To compete in this industry, we had to come up with a brand new concept from top to bottom.
We decided to make beauty social.
We designed a platform that is community-focused, convenient, and trustworthy. Genz leverages their network more than any other group when making purchases. We know how important embedding social into a product is, and we’ve seen it done so well with Snackpass in the food industry, Venmo with payments and Public with investments.
Launch
With 100 salons on glow, we launched to the app store this week! We have a waitlist of 2,000 people, and are SO excited to get our users USING glow.
