Marisa Milton knows there’s something about a person’s relationship with their hair stylist that makes it hard to start over in a new place. When she moved from South Dakota to Mankato for college, she kept driving the three hours home whenever she needed to get her hair done.
“You end up becoming so close to your stylist,” she told Minne Inno. “It can be hard to break up with them. … Trust is hard to build.”
When she decided it was time to find someone new in her new home city, she started calling and peppering stylists with questions she learned to ask after working as a receptionist at a salon. She asked about the products they used and their level of experience. “Most clients don’t ask as many questions as I did.”
Believing she wasn’t alone in the struggle to find the right stylist, Milton started TopKnott, an app that helps people with their search while also giving stylists and others in the beauty industry a new way to connect with potential clients. The app provides a way for prospective customers to ask the kinds of questions Milton wanted answered.
Milton built TopKnott with Washington D.C.-based software development agency Think Nimble. It launched in the Twin Cities, its first market, last month and has 150 users so far, with 50 of them being stylists.
Milton moved to Minneapolis after graduating from Minnesota State University-Mankato last year with a degree in marketing. She opted to launch TopKnott here because it seemed like the right-sized metro area to start the app before moving it into other markets of similar sizes. Maybe it’ll help her find her next long-term stylist relationship, too. “I still haven’t found my forever stylist yet in the Twin Cities,” she said.
While the idea for the platform came from a customer's perspective, she hopes the app will benefit stylists, too. Working as a receptionist at a salon gave her an inside perspective of the industry and taught her how much stylists have to hustle to build their client list.
“These professionals have to really build their clientele from the ground up,” she said. “They’re not given enough resources to do it with ease.”
Beauty professionals and salons pay a monthly subscription to appear in the TopKnott app. An individual stylist pays $10 a month. Salons can pay $25 a month for four people. Each additional person costs $6 a month.
