Aveda UK launches hair service booking website with Powered by Flossie.
Premium organic hair products company, Aveda UK (Estee Lauder Cosmetics Limited), has launched a brand-new hair service booking website in conjunction with software company, Powered by Flossie.
In a world-first application, the website curates available appointment times across the wide network of Aveda partner salons and promotes them through social media to savvy consumers and converts them through a ground-breaking booking experience. Customers can now “book the look” in under 30 seconds at Aveda partner salons.
What’s unique about this approach? Powered by Flossie Founder and CEO, Jenene Crossan, explains that it’s never been done before: “In a year where high street salons have experienced considerable challenges, product companies are being asked to step-up and offer customer-led digital solutions that make it easier to get customers safely back into salons. But there has been a non-trivial problem holding back the industry; global hair colour product companies — such as Aveda — have enormous and very fragmented salon distribution networks. These salons use many varied salon management software systems across their individually run businesses making it impossible to aggregate their availability data.”
Powered by Flossie is technology that accesses and aggregates salon network data from hundreds of different online booking systems into one central API and front-end themed booking platform.
Using this, Aveda is able to proactively digitise, merchandise and track the full customer journey on behalf of their salon network. This is made possible without requiring changes to their salons’ existing software providers and without APIs.
Through Powered by Flossie, Aveda UK is now able to take a more customer focused approach in how they want to sell their services and products together online.
“The process is satisfyingly simple, and delightfully efficient — try it for yourself and compare it to the last time you tried to book your hair colour service online” states Crossan.
Background Industry stats
The hair and beauty industry was valued in 2019 at £8.6billion per annum¹. Legacy technology that is poorly documented with no public APIs is holding back the opportunity for product companies of all sizes to aggregate their network data and promote appointments online on behalf of their salon partner networks.
Worldwide the hair and beauty industry is expected to be hit by a 15% decline (from an annual growth rate of 5%²) due to Covid-19. Aveda UK are the first to the UK-market to trial new innovative technology to solve a technically difficult strategic pain point and showing more support to the industry at such a critical time.
About Powered by Flossie
New Zealand founded and headquartered, Powered by Flossie is technology that allows multinational hair and beauty product companies to access and aggregate distribution network (salon) data. The technology solves a technically difficult strategic pain point commonly held by every product company servicing the hair and beauty sector.
Hair and beauty professional product companies have never been able to access the availability data from across their fragmented salon networks. This is because their salon partners are all using different software systems which provide no APIs and there is no way to aggregate the data.
Powered by Flossie now aggregates the data into a central API and front-end themed platform where enterprise clients are able to proactively digitise, merchandise & track the full customer data journey on behalf of their salon network. This is made possible without requiring any changes to their existing software providers and without APIs.
This is a world-first-and-only novel solution, only technically possible due to the 8-year stacked investment in technology specific to the industry and a very specific set of skills held by the founding team.
¹https://www.statista.com/statistics/290121/expenditure-on-hairdressing-beauty-salons-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
² https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/352593
