We need some new Groom-tech

It’s time for someone to shake up the hair cutting industry in London.

The problems couldn’t be clearer that need solving

• The price of a haircut is too high
• The experience of getting your haircut affordably is awful
• Barber discovery mainly comes through recommendations as there is no bastion of trust to identify where and who will give a decent haircut

There has been some movement in the area. A company popped up last year called GetSmooth.
GetSmooth offered uber style hairdressers that come to you at a prebooked time, cut your hair, clean up and leave.

Something’s not quite right though. My co-founder and I who share the frustrations outlined above booked in back to back haircuts in our office.
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As a two person booking we were offered a discount, as well as a discount for being first time customers. The company and bookings run through a square space website which allowed us to make the booking with both discounts.
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​The experience

At 10pm the night before however they emailed us to say that we had to cancel our booking and rebook it as we weren’t allowed to have a double discount. It was a bit frustrating to say the least.

The hairdresser turned up an hour late with no prewarning, the hair cuts took over an hour and the hairdresser disagreed with what we wanted and cut our hair to his personal style.

Now I’m not bashing the hairdresser. He was a young qualified barber, trying to make a living and I hugely respect his hustle and appetite for risk by working with GetSmooth.
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But the whole experience is still way off.

​Current situation

After that haircut, we went back to our normal way of getting our haircut at Supercuts in Westfield stratford.

​Here is what that experience looks like:

• Arrive at 8:30 am and become second person in the queue
• Supercuts opens around 9am, never earlier, but rarely on time.
• Fill out a card with my name and details and take a seat

Note that I do this every time they must have two dozen cards with my name on a this point.

• Luckily I was second so there is a seat for me to take

Note that you cannot prebook, it is simply turn up and wait.

• There are two hairdressers who also act as receptionists so while the first person gets their hair cut the second hairdresser stands at the desk and collects the sign in cards
• The queue keeps growing and more people turn up and ask how long the wait is
• After getting my haircut, I head to the front desk and pay the hairdresser who cut my hair while the queue of people throw shade at me for slowing down their day

​Ideas

​There are a tonne of examples of tech being thrown at things unnecessarily in the world but I genuinely believe the whole experience of getting your hair cut can be improved

On mobile barbers:

• Don’t make customers cancel and rebook — if there is an error, sort it yourself. The purpose is to transform the experience into a productive one.
• Build a realtime tracking system. Somewhere between amazon delivery and uber would be fine. You can buy these white-labelled and there is a real joy in seeing where and when your barber is instead of waiting in suspense.
• Allow clients to preselect their desired haircut

On the in-store experience:

• Have an app/website where the customer can prepay
• Have an app/website where the customer can preselect their haircut
• Have an app/website that shows the queue volume and estimated wait

Note that by having any of the three above you can capture really rich customer data that can feed into increasing the LTV of a customer as well as better staffing needs.

• You can even go further with these and allow people to join a digital queue with pre warnings. If they aren’t there when it’s their turn tough luck they lose their spot, but warning them when there are 2 in the queue in front would (a) allow them to go on with their day and (b) free up space in your shop

​Short but sweet. Had to get my thoughts out. Have some to add — comment below.

Nod to Barbzy that just launched — trying to make a grassroots change to one of these problems.