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New Business Management System Aims to Simplify Salon Operations
The creators of new business management system Boulevard came from an engineering background and had no previous beauty experience, but the challenges they experienced when booking services convinced them that there was a need for a better system.
November 19, 2019
2 min to read
The creators of new business management system Boulevard came from an engineering background and had no previous beauty experience, but the challenges they experienced when booking services convinced them that there was a need for a better system. That’s why they set out to create a system designed around the needs of salons. “It was clear to us that these salons and spas were being severely underserved by the technology currently available to them,” says Matt Danna, who created the platform along with Sean Stavropoulos. As they planned, the two spoke with many business owners, managers, and front desk staff and found that the systems they were using were not built for how they wanted to operate.
To familiarize themselves with how salons operate, Danna and Stavropoulos worked at the front desks of local salons and looked at their workflows. “From learning how to properly schedule to seeing which metrics owners looked for when measuring performance, we gained crucial first-hand experience that directly inspired how we designed our platform,” says Danna. “It was all about focusing on the little things, like surfacing the right information at the right time, or how to reduce the number of steps in common workflows.”
In response to these issues, Boulevard was created to handle appointments, payments, scheduling, client profiles, inventory, reports, and more. It allows users to customize scheduling and staff settings, service categories, pricing, and more at the brand and location level, and to confirm, reschedule, and send customizable appointment reminders to customers in real-time.
Danna and Stavropoulos found that part of the issue with self-booking systems was the lack of customer notes, like custom pricing, unique timing, and special accommodations. “Self-booking was almost like a backdoor into the schedule that actually ended up reducing revenue because it allowed for random and incomplete bookings that cluttered calendars,” explains Danna. To solve this, Boulevard includes logic that helps optimize the way appointments are placed on the schedule and is designed to prevent gaps between clients, including special accommodations and timings. “Our partners are seeing an 81% reduction in no-shows and late cancellations because of the improved experience for their clientele,” says Danna.
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