What is Book Salon?
Book Salon provides entrepreneurs with a full suite of modern tools to run a successful business. Book Salon offers payment terminals and a payment processing service, in addition to its website builder, online booking systems, and cash and accounting reports.
The Current Landscape
Approximately 65% of salons in the EU have no booking system or any other digital tools. Most beauty and wellness entrepreneurs are women, often with immigrant backgrounds.
Data from Book Salon shows that 52% of appointment bookings happen between 5 PM to 9 AM. This means that salons not using online booking or booking apps are most likely to lose potentially tens of thousands of euros in a year for appointments that are left empty.
The European beauty and wellness trades are dominated by small establishments that often have fewer than three employees. Additionally, the share of self-employment in these sectors is two to ten times higher than in the whole of the economy.
Company Birth Story
In 2016, Jonne Castren realized that the beauty and wellness industry is still struggling with many day-to-day tasks that could be simplified and automated. Often, entrepreneurs in this field are micro-entrepreneurs and have an immigrant background. They'd spend up to 100 hours a year in boring, repeating admin tasks which could have been avoided with digital tools.
Jonne spent hundreds of hours in industry trade shows, visiting salons, and really talking with the entrepreneurs about their struggles and where they could need help with. He quickly realized that the entrepreneurs felt like they were alone – being solely responsible for running a salon, marketing the services, and making sure that provisions and other payments were shared correctly between their employees or rental chairs, caused them to be stressed and overburdened.
So Book Salon set out to build a solution that not only helps microentrepreneurs with online booking systems and cash and accounting reports but also payment terminals and a payment processing service to run their business successfully.
The Solution
Larger corporate PSP competitors such as Nets require entrepreneurs to pay per user and commit to lengthy contracts with vague compounding cost structures.
Many PSPs are driving the entrepreneurs to make a contract with them by promising a low percentage. But they make the contract super long, anywhere between 36 months to 7 years, and include lots of hidden costs that increase the overall costs. If the entrepreneurs make the business grow, they also gain a big percentage of that growth.
Book Salon differs in that it offers its platform to salons and entrepreneurs for free with the option to upgrade to a paid package with an unlimited number of users and Book Salon charges commission from in-store payments and online payments. This approach makes it uniquely accessible, profitable and transparent for micro-entrepreneurs.
Book Salon has proved its popularity with over 1,500 clients generating more than €75,000 in MRR in March 2022, a figure which had grown over 20 percent month to month that year. Their NPS score is an outstanding 79, and less than 1% of their clients churn. The company has raised a total of €5M in funding from investors such as Big Bets VC and Joint Effects.
A Customer Story
“I used to spend Christmas holidays and even Mother’s Day working through the mistakes in payment reports. It’s like being a private investigator, trying to figure out what has happened when no one can remember where the mistake was made. Me and my employees wasted precious time for this every week. With Book Salon’s systems in place, none of this happens anymore. Their platform is sophisticated and answers to my exact needs,” says Salla Priuska, entrepreneur at Royal Beauty Spa.
A Founder Quote
“Book Salon aim to disrupt the current Payment Service Provider market, and the hair, beauty, and wellness sector is our first target. They believe that PSPs need to go beyond providing payment processing services.. That’s why at Book Salon they also provide access to industry-specific value-adding services and tools that help the entrepreneurs save time, effort, and money.
A staggering number of European salons are still relying on pen and paper to manage their bookings. In addition to lost income due to missed booking opportunities, being available to pick up the phone stops your workflow with clients and adds the stress of being constantly available around your phone. Book Salon want to help microentrepreneurs manage and grow their salons, and focus on providing amazing services with an awesome client experience – not admin or payment-related hassles.”
Check It Out : https://pro.booksalon.fi/
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