ShearShare’s co-founders have just a few items on their to-do list in the coming months.
• Moving from their longtime home in Dallas to Buffalo, where they will live and work out of Seneca One Tower.
• Launching a major update of their web-based platform, which allows stylists and barbers to rent a chair in an existing salon.
• Embarking on a hiring binge in Buffalo that spans engineering, operations, sales and product.
Such is life for a company that recently won $500,000 in the 43North business competition, which requires them to work from Buffalo for at least a year.
If all goes well, the engagement will last much longer.
“We are giving ourselves the opportunity to really be open to the excitement of what Buffalo has to offer,” said CEO Tye Caldwell, who founded the company with his wife, Courtney. “We’re moving to the north, but with a place that feels like it has southern hospitality.”
As a 43North winner, ShearShare will have a naturally prominent place in Buffalo’s startup community, with a built-in local network of partners and cheerleaders.
But the company carries plenty of its own cachet into Western New York: ShearShare has been through a variety of accelerator programs and raised a $2.3 million seed round in October 2020 backed by prominent investors.
The Caldwells have also been recognized as exciting Black entrepreneurs in an industry that is starved of racial diversity. Tye Caldwell became the first Black male last year elected to the Advisory Council for the Professional Beauty Association. ShearShare was selected in 2020 to be a member of the inaugural Google for Startup Accelerator for Black Founders – the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund subsequently invested $300,000 in the company.
A Dallas television station reported last year that Courtney Caldwell was the 33rd Black female founder in the U.S. to raise more than $1 million in startup funding.
They also have deep business bona fides. Tye Caldwell has a doctorate in professional barbering and has run his own salon in Dallas for 26 years. Courtney Caldwell had a successful career in technology marketing – she was working as director of digital marketing, strategy and innovation for Oracle when the couple hit on the idea of ShearShare.
The premise was to create a company that can be the glue that binds beauty industry stakeholders closer together. Every empty chair for a facility owner represents lost revenue, the Caldwells say. In the meantime, stylists build followings that are based on their brand and skill – not so much the facility where they work.
Enter ShearShare, dubbed “HairBnB” by its founders.
“In the salon and barbershop industry, space is a line item,” Tye Caldwell said. “It’s a zero if it’s not being used.”
ShearShare has spent the past few years building intuitive software that will be well-received in an industry that has long been ignored by tech, and by developing the supply side of its marketplace.
Now that it is launching an update, the company is ready to start pouring resources into scaling its business. They are also adding elements such as a virtual beauty supply store and an analytics dashboard that helps independent stylists manage their business.
“We collect data that nobody else is even asking questions about,” Courtney Caldwell said. “It lets our clients see the strength of their business and understand their budget every month."
The Caldwells themselves are ready for a new adventure, with a son who has graduated high school and is a second-year cadet at the Air Force Academy. They’re moving into the downtown tower that was vacant just a few years ago but is now the site of developer Douglas Jemal’s grand “tech village” rehabilitation.
It’s a point of good-natured marital contention whether they’re moving in before Christmas or New Year’s. But once they get here, they plan to make a mark.
“It’s exciting any time you get an opportunity not only to expose your life and what you’re building to a whole new city, especially one that’s rolling out the red carpet for you,” Tye Caldwell said. “We are planning to grow super fast in Buffalo.”
