To help the beauty and wellness industry get the tech they need to remain competitive in today’s market, a new local startup has built an online marketplace for them to advertise their services and find new clients.
Based in suburban Bloomingdale, ShearCircle offers salons, spas and fitness centers, as well as independent stylists, therapists and trainers, an online platform to streamline their business.
Consumers can find, book and pay for services listed on the platform, and enroll in a rewards program to keep them coming back.
For the businesses and independent workers, ShearCircle allows them to receive instant appointment notifications, manage staff schedules and track performance statistics. ShearCircle also provides a job portal for workers to find open positions at beauty and wellness centers.
"I’m building a one-stop shop for this underserved industry," said ShearCircle co-founder and co-CEO Ranjit Pentapati.
Pentapati said he is trying to tap into the market of mom-and-pop salons that haven’t or don’t know how to create websites and online booking portals for their businesses.
“Most of them don’t even know how to set up their business online,” Pentapati said.
Pentapati, who resigned from his role at Chicago tech company Gogo in 2017 to work on building ShearCircle, officially launched the startup at the beginning of this year.
ShearCircle is available anywhere in the U.S., though most of its American users are in the Chicagoland area. Locally, there are currently 20 businesses on ShearCircle, including Iva Parlor, Hair Love Salon and Olena Massage, Pentapati said.
To list services on ShearCircle, businesses pay $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year.
The platform is also available in Pentapati’s home country, India, where more than 200 businesses are using it.
“It is going really, really good, and we’re thinking about what else we can do,” Pentapati said.
Similar services do already exist, though. StyleSeat, based in San Francisco, connects beauty and wellness professionals with clients, and has raised $40 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. Additionally, San Francisco-based Booksy works in the same space and has raised more than $20 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
In Chicago, Whittl was a startup founded to allow consumers to compare prices for beauty, wellness, child care and other services. However, it shut down in 2016 after raising $4.6 million.
