Why we are building Amber Wellness ?
It’s been an interesting journey for us, these past few months at Amber and interestingly enough, I’m repeatedly asked the following question:“ What is Amber? ” and “ Why are you building it? ”
Whilst in my mind I was fully aware and certain of the ‘what’ and ‘why’, hence, this is my attempt to answer both these questions. If I were to sum it up in one line, I’d say:
“ We are building a social commerce platform for beauty and wellness.”
OPPORTUNITY: When you look at beauty services as a niche, we have 2 important considerations to keep in mind:
- The kind of service being undertaken
- The provider of this service
This is a part of the whole services bouquet where we believe a great moat can be created and the user-experience across the online and offline world can be significantly changed and nobody in India has done it well.
PERCEPTION: Traditionally beauty services for women have been perceived as “get cleaned up” (in the salon world, they call this threading and waxing) and rightly so. 50% of all services consumed in the name of beauty are routine services but here’s the obvious irony, the 80–20 rule -> they only contribute to 15% of the total money spent by the consumer on ‘beauty’.
WE want to change the perception of beauty services to actually include and mean: Look good and feel good.
When you look at the vanity and pampering part of beauty services (contributing to 85% of the consumer spends), they tend to be very personal in nature and user-behavior is very stylist-driven. ( There is a whole bunch of anecdotal evidence of customers changing salons when their stylists change the salon)
USER-EXPERIENCE: The changing nature of beauty services has brought about acceptance for home salons in the country. We believe this section is going to become huge and a standard user- experience for people. But fundamentally, you can do a lot of things differently when you are delivering services at home vs at-the-salon (equipment, ambiance, environment).
SUPPLY-SIDE: Majority of the beautician community in India still works at salons rather than being independent contractors even when users are attached to a particular stylist than a particular salon/salon-brand.
Our approach to building this platform will therefore be purely stylist-driven.
We want to enable stylists to:
- Build their brand
- Grow their businesses
- Manage their business and become entrepreneurs
While on-boarding free-lance beauticians onto our platform we are not only helping them up-skill themselves through our technical training, but also with entrepreneurial training on how to manage their brand and business.
TECHNOLOGY: We are building tools and technologies for the supply-side to actually enable them to manage their business. Our supply-side mobile-app has the following features:
- Calendar and booking management
- Customer-relationship panel
- Online Profile-building tool.
We believe technology is the only way to build a great platform in this fragmented space and we are committed to building a great user-experience.
CONSUMER-SIDE EDUCATION: Through our research and talking/meeting endless consumers over the past few months we realised two important facets about consumer behaviour on how they consumer beauty content and services:
a) There is little-to-no education/detailing around beauty services
b) People want to discover and look at beauty content discover their own likeness and style.
Keeping that in mind, we are building a mobile-front-end which not only allows people to browse, post and share beauty content but also educates the consumer about the why+prepare+care part of each service. Our first goal would be to educate consumers about each type of beauty service and remove the hesitation and information assymetry on the same. Post some time, we would like to build Amber to become a social platform which perpetuate trends by encouraging customers to put up their favorite looks.
This is a brief of what we intend to do and why. Hope you give us a chance to service you. :) Check us out at http://getamber.com
