// industry — salons & services
Service businesses lose money in two specific places: slots that go unfilled because scheduling is approximate, and calls that go unanswered because everyone is with a customer. We build systems that close both.
// what we build
Booking looks simple and is not. Get it approximately right and you either double-book a person or leave money sitting in an empty chair.
Staff as resources across the day, with per-service durations, skill matching, and staggered steps — a colour service occupies the chair while the stylist is free in the middle. Approximating this is what causes double bookings.
Customers book what is genuinely free, not a request that someone reconciles later. The same view your team works from at the desk, so there is one truth rather than two.
Courses of treatments drawn down as they are used, gift cards, memberships and loyalty — the commercial machinery that raises revenue per customer and is almost always still on a spreadsheet.
Card and wallet checkout, stored payment methods for deposits, and cancellation rules that actually get enforced. No-shows are a direct cost and the fix is commercial, not motivational.
Confirmations, reminders and rebooking prompts sent where customers actually read them. WhatsApp reminders reduce no-shows more reliably than email, and we run the WhatsApp API stack ourselves.
Several branches on one system, staff who work across them, stock and pricing that can vary by site, and an owner's view that answers which location, service and staff member actually make money.
Live project · London, United Kingdom
A salon management system running the business end to end: multi-stylist resource scheduling, packages, gift cards and loyalty, card and Apple Pay checkout, PDF invoicing, transactional email — and an AI voice assistant that answers the phone and takes bookings while the team is with clients.
// the interesting part
The hardest operational hour in a salon is the one where every chair is full and the phone will not stop. A missed call is usually a missed booking, and a callback an hour later often finds the caller has booked somewhere else.
For Kapil Hair Studio we built an AI voice assistant that answers calls, explains services and pricing, checks genuine availability and takes bookings — grounded in a maintained knowledge base of the salon's actual services rather than left to improvise, which matters when the question is about a treatment's price or suitability.
The rule is the same one we apply to every AI project: the assistant handles the mechanical part and hands to a human the moment judgement is needed. A voice agent that confidently invents a price is worse than a voicemail.
The same pattern applies to clinics, dental practices, spas, tuition centres and any appointment-driven business where the phone rings hardest exactly when nobody can pick it up.
// straight answers
Often you should not. Off-the-shelf booking apps are good and cheap, and if yours fits, keep it. Custom starts making sense when you are paying per staff member across several branches, when the product cannot model your services, when you need it joined to stock or accounting, or when you want the customer data in your own system rather than a vendor's.
Yes — this is our own area. We run two WhatsApp Business API products, so reminders, confirmations and rebooking prompts can go through the official API on your own business number rather than an unofficial workaround that risks the number being banned.
Yes. The salon system described above runs in London. Most collaboration is remote with overlap hours agreed up front, and we handle the local specifics — currency, tax treatment, payment methods such as Apple Pay.
Yes, including staff who work across locations, per-site pricing and service menus, and an owner-level view across all of them.
A focused booking and payments build is typically six to ten weeks to a usable first release. Packages, loyalty, multi-branch and a voice assistant are best added in later slices once the scheduling core is proven in daily use.
// next step
A short message is enough to start. The first scoping call is free, and you will be talking to the person who would write the code.