If you happen to’ve ever traveled in rural areas in France, you might have realized a French peculiarity. Even within the seemingly much less populated cities, there’s a hair salon.
French startup Planity has been profiting from France’s love affair with hair salons to launch a SaaS product for these companies particularly. Over time, the corporate expanded to different varieties of magnificence salons, comparable to barbers and nail salons.
And it has been working surprisingly effectively as there are actually greater than 40,000 small companies counting on Planity for appointment reserving and extra. In reality, the startup lately raised a €45 million Sequence C spherical ($48 million at right this moment’s change price) in a spherical led by InfraVia Capital Companions with current traders Crédit Mutuel Innovation, Revaia and Bpifrance’s Digital Enterprise fund additionally taking part.
Planity’s trajectory is an fascinating one on condition that it isn’t the primary large European tech firm attempting to simplify magnificence salon appointment reserving. Particularly, Treatwell is already reside in a dozen European nations and had seemingly captured the digitization alternative of this extremely fragmented market.
Doctolib for magnificence salons
So what’s totally different with Planity? The startup’s co-founder and CEO Antoine Puymirat first began engaged on on-line appointment reserving in 2007. His first startup known as ClicRDV was a white-label on-line reserving answer for all kinds of companies. It was acquired by Pages Jaune (now SoLocal).
After a number of years working for SoLocal, he left the corporate and went again to the drafting board with a extra centered strategy. As a substitute of making an all-encompassing appointment answer, he selected to concentrate on magnificence salons particularly.
Across the similar time, Doctolib was beginning to take off. The French startup, which is now a unicorn, has fully modified appointment reserving for medical doctors and different health-related jobs. Its affect is even greater than that because it has profoundly modified how French individuals take care of well being points.
Planity drew some inspiration from Doctolib. It’s a SaaS platform that fully replaces the nice outdated paper pocket book that was broadly utilized in hair salons. When individuals name for an appointment, staff write down the appointment in Planity immediately. And, after all, individuals may ebook appointments on-line by way of Planity’s app and web site. It turns into the one supply of reality and simplifies salon administration.
Not like Treatwell, Planity doesn’t cost a fee on every future sale. As a substitute, Planity is a standard SaaS product with a month-to-month subscription payment. The primary product at the moment prices €69 monthly. (With a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation, it signifies that Planity seemingly generates tens of tens of millions of euros in annual recurring income.)
“Most of the existing players have adopted a traditional marketplace model like the one of Booking.com or TheFork,” Antoine Puymirat instructed me. “Clients pay a percentage of the total amount of each reservation. But we realized that this model wasn’t working as some companies have been around for 15 years, but they never really reached a significant scale in Europe.”
In keeping with him, the principle subject is that the majority prospects are returning prospects. And also you don’t need to pay a fee each time they ebook an appointment. With Planity, the extra your prospects use it to ebook appointments on-line, the much less time you waste on the telephone — and it doesn’t price you extra. That’s why magnificence salons encourage their prospects to make use of Planity.
“We go a bit further than that. We also let our businesses manage working hours. Employees can clock in and out in the morning and in the evening. We handle vacations. We can export payroll information,” Puymirat mentioned.
Each month, round eight million individuals go to Planity. The platform handles round 10 million bookings monthly — 4 million of them are booked immediately by the tip prospects on Planity. Different appointments are entered manually by staff when a buyer is speaking to them immediately.
The platform handles ready lists, ship reminders through textual content messages and creates a customized schedule for every worker. Planity may change the point-of-sales answer for an extra €20 monthly.
Some shoppers additionally get cost terminals from Planity. In that case, Planity makes use of Stripe’s APIs for the cost stack and takes a small reduce on every transaction. However small retailers which might be already working with their financial institution for his or her cost terminals can preserve utilizing these terminals.
Up subsequent, the corporate plans to deal with wellbeing and health facilities. Planity’s major market stays France — its house nation — however the firm is beginning to develop in Belgium and Germany.
Along with the fragmentation of the wonder salon business, there’s a barrier to entry to create a Planity competitor. The corporate has a big gross sales crew. They go and meet new shoppers to guarantee that they perceive how the software program platform works.
This technique is each capital intensive and requires a stable gross sales playbook to work. There are at the moment round 200 gross sales individuals working for Planity, and the corporate plans to rent much more.
