Why We Invested in theCut: Classic Cool needs IT Infrastructure
We saw theCut’s potential right away. CEO Obi Omile and CTO Kush Patel have created a powerful scheduling and business management app for barbershops, and connected a fast-growing, loyal community of clients and barbers.
We recognized three fundamental truths about the industry:
- Men’s style and beauty is a huge industry that’s been neglected by the traditional start-up community. That goes double for theCut’s initial target audience: people-of-color who go to barbershops in urban areas (an estimated 21mm potential clients, a $5BN industry).
- Without an easy-to-use business management backbone, barber shops may wither away. Individual barbers waste time setting appointments in old-fashioned appointment books, have trouble attracting new clients, and often lose existing clients double-booking. Customers, meanwhile, have trouble finding a good haircut, are forced to wait in long lines when they drop in, payment at shops is cash-only or otherwise clunky, and post-haircut “product” recommendations can be hard to find.
- Existing beauty scheduling apps don’t cut it for barbershops. The best, Booksy and StyleSeat, are designed for salons. Men are often squeamish about beauty and the branding for existing players isn’t focused on men at all (much like Dove in its early days)!
To solve this, theCut has created an app specifically designed to meet needs of barbershops and their customers.
theCut uses an elegant interface to access a centralized database of barber locations, prices, service offerings and reviews, and combines it with a mobile payment system to take care of every step of the sales process. The app allows customers to find barbers, look at their work, read reviews from other customers and book appointments. Barbers meanwhile have the customer discovery process, booking and scheduling, and customer relationship management (CRM) taken care of. We also love how customizable the app was (e.g., cancellation rules can be tweaked).
Early growth has been tremendous and there’s a core group of people on both sides of the marketplace who absolutely love and rave about the product: there are already 15,000 barbers using the app and almost 250,000 clients, 75 percent of whom have found a barber using the app. In total, they’ve booked in excess of 1,000,000 appointments in only 2 years.
We are delighted to begin working with them. We think theCut has enormous potential in an underserved community.
Let’s build things that matter,
Team Prototype Capital
