Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to getting an appointment for your hair or other treatment… that’s a different story: the bespoke nature of much of the work has meant that a large portion of professionals providing these services has been kept offline when it comes to interacting with customers.
But that’s changing, and today Boulevard, one of a wave of software companies building a path to digitize booking appointments, messaging customers and accepting payments for hair salons, nail salons, barbershops, suppliers facial and skin care services, and others. in the world of beauty and wellness services, announces that it has raised $70 million in funding, a sign of the changing demand and traction this particular startup is getting in the space.
The funding, a Series C, will be used to continue to expand Boulevard’s product and engineering teams and to develop more tools aimed at an ever-widening set of users in the larger wellness and beauty sector (those product additions typically to be great, most recently adding an entirely new payments feature). This round is led by Point72 Private Investments, with participation from previous backers Toba Capital, Index Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, BoxGroup and VMG Partners.
It brings the total raised by the company to around $110 million (according to PitchBook data) since Boulevard was founded in February 2016; And while the startup doesn’t disclose its valuation, CEO and co-founder Matt Danna said in an interview that figure has more than tripled since last summer, particularly notable given current pressures in the tech sector and financial markets more broadly.
To be clear, Boulevard faces plenty of competition: Other big names include Zenoti, which at the end of 2020 was valued at more than $1 billion; Booksy, which PitchBook estimates was valued at just under $540 million in November 2021 after it also raised $70 million earlier that year; and Fresha, valued at more than $640 million at the end of 2021, among many others.
But at the same time, Los Angeles-based Boulevard got this infusion of funding at a boosted valuation because it has been on a roll. Focusing on the US to date, the company said it saw 188% growth in annual recurring revenue compared to the prior year, with more than 25,000 people in 2,000 salons and spas in the country now using your platform. It’s also a massive market, and according to Danna’s estimates, still with plenty of untapped business, Boulevard cites figures forecasting sales of beauty and personal care products to exceed $1.4 billion, and the spa sector to exceed $150 billion, both by 2025.
The gap in the market that Boulevard is building to fill is that one-man bands, independent lounges and larger chains are all dealing with the same problem. Personal care is exactly that, personal and individualized, and therefore it has been difficult for personal care specialists to use scheduling tools to organize it. Individual clients have different requirements, treatments can take more or less time, and specialists are not robots whose time management can be predicted.
Image credits: Blvd under CC BY 2.0 license.
Danna and her co-founder, CTO Sean Stavropoulos, previously worked together at Fullscreen as head of product and head of engineering, respectively. They were the first to have that idea: Danna describes it as “tools for YouTube creators before YouTube created them itself,” and said they came up with the idea for Boulevard from a joke between them. “I was making fun of [Sean’s] hair and saying I needed to cut it, and telling me he couldn’t find time to phone for an appointment,” she said. They realized there was so much friction in the process that they didn’t need to be there: Why did they need to make a phone call at this time?
“We started to obsess over this,” Danna continued. They decided that this would be what they would tackle and build as a business.
Then things took an investigative turn, dressed in civilian clothes. The pair posed as UCLA students doing research, Danna said, going from room to room asking questions about what worked and what didn’t with programming in her workplace. They built a picture of why so much was still being done offline. In short, it was about “optimizing performance,” Danna said. Specialists and their salons wanted to be perfectly booked, and the salons weren’t completely out of line either. About half used some on-premises or cloud software, but none worked for salons or their clients.
Image credits: Blvd under CC BY 2.0 license.
Their solution was to give users more control over how to create and customize appointment lengths for clients, based on specific treatments and specialists, and for each booking to in turn affect how the rest of the day’s schedule looked (not very different from Google Maps and the constraint solver used to help estimate travel time for the vehicle’s route in a particular set of traffic conditions, Danna explained). Over time, the plan will also be to help individual consumers (clients) create their own profiles that can be applied to any reservations they make with a particular salon, and perhaps potentially elsewhere as well, in the style of the marketplace.
The uptick Boulevard saw in the pandemic is another sign of demand in the market, and perhaps a sign that its customers and the industry as a whole are more recession-proof than some might have assumed. Danna said the Boulevard business inevitably went on hiatus in the second quarter of 2020 as COVID-19 took hold, but “it was recovering by a quarter of that,” she said. Although that is with a different set of workers.
“Across all the companies we work with, they make 15% more revenue than they did before the pandemic, even though they have 20% fewer staff,” he said. “It was a big remodel.”
It will be interesting to see how and if that continues to develop as Boulevard contemplates international expansion. But for now, it’s a startup that its investors believe has a solid footing in its local market.
“As the personal care industry continues to grow, so will the technology in creating seamless experiences that keep customers coming back,” Eddie Kang, a partner at Point72 Private Investments, said in a statement. “Boulevard has not only designed an elegant and visionary platform that meets a pressing need in a fast-growing industry, but has also created a thoughtful, customer-centric culture validated through world-class retention. We are excited to support the Boulevard team as they continue to grow.” Kang joins the board with this round.
Source: techcrunch.com