The personal care services industry has swiftly rebounded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite dropping 84% between February and April 2020, in the post-pandemic period, employment numbers are projected to grow 8.1% annually through 2030 — five times faster than the rest of the economy. Due to the employment volatility in the pandemic period, many salons have evolved to favor booth rentals, where stylists operate individually as opposed to being staffed with the salon.

That volatility has also caused software to become an integral part of everyday operations for salons. Tech adoption has expanded across the entire salon value chain, from online booking to customer relationship management to inventory management. Despite this, many solutions fail to address the specific needs of the industry. For example, though many booking solutions similar to that of Calendly exist in the market, few incorporate the business logic used by salons to account for staffing, predictable changes in appointment times, and double-booking capacity, among other parameters.

Boulevard is an LA-based company that describes itself as a “client experience platform for appointment-based, self-care businesses.” It provides software solutions tailored for businesses in the beauty and wellness industry. Its platform offers tools to help salons, spas, and similar establishments manage appointments, streamline operations, handle scheduling and customer interactions, and facilitate online booking services. Boulevard aims to enhance the overall customer experience while aiding business owners in optimizing their operations and increasing efficiency.

Boulevard was founded in 2016 by Matt Danna (CEO) and Sean Stavropoulos (CTO), two coworkers who were previously the heads of product and engineering at Fullscreen. While there, they helped scale Fullscreen to an enterprise-quality tech service for the creator and entertainment industry.

One evening, Danna and Stavropoulos were joking about getting a haircut. The conversation ended with Stavropoulos trying to schedule an appointment, only for his call to go unanswered by the front desk because it was after hours. In the ensuing days, Stavropoulos was too busy to call during the day and continued to be unable to book an appointment at night.

To investigate why a software service to book appointments hadn’t already been created, Danna and Stavropoulos scouted and interviewed various salons around Los Angeles by pretending to be UCLA students, even volunteering to work behind the counter for free on multiple occasions. “When you call to make an appointment, the front desk is doing yield optimization in real time,” said Danna. Among other factors, salons would consider the duration of past visits, stylists they previously worked with, the likelihood of lateness or no-show, and when (if at all) a double or triple booking could be possible. As Danna put it, “all this logic is happening in real time in their brain while they’re on call”.

During this time, Danna and Stavropoulos gained other key insights into the personal care and beauty industry. In particular, while most places used calendar software to centralize appointments, few incorporated data from past visits to automate the appointment scheduling process. From these experiences, the duo recognized the friction that stylists encountered in managing daily operations, as well as the high-stakes nature of scheduling in this industry. Danna and Stavropoulos calculated that even 45 minutes of downtime for a stylist on any given day could cause them to be cashflow negative for that day.

Upon recognizing the potential value that could be created within this market, they began building an end-to-end software solution that received constant feedback from the salons they still worked with. Through the launch of the product, Danna and Stavropoulos worked at each user’s front desk for up to a week to ensure operations were running smoothly with their software. “Our platform is rip-and-replace,” says Danna, “so we really wanted to make sure we were end-to-end buttoned up”.

Self-Booking

Boulevard offers online booking integrations that businesses can use on their websites and across different platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Google. Using Boulevard’s integrations, clients can maintain an on-brand booking interface while also tracking engagement across different channels.

Source: Boulevard

Boulevard aims to provide a convenient experience for customers by enabling different booking options according to the type of service and availability of a desired stylist using Boulevard’s Precision Scheduling Software.

The experience on the customer side is made convenient and easy, with different booking options for type of service and availability according to Boulevard’s Precision Scheduling software.

Client Management

Boulevard’s client management offering allows customers to automatically retain information about past client visits. It creates new client profiles during the online booking process, and instantly adds and saves details on each client.

Using this offering, clients can be searched by details such as location, provider, referral source, and past appointments. Suggested products can also be added based on previous purchases to upsell clients. Clients’ total appointments, show rate, and average visits can also be viewed to get a sense of a client’s total lifetime value.

Forms

Boulevards’ Forms offering allows customers to create on-brand digital forms and charts using a drag-and-drop form builder intended to make the creation process as easy as possible. Examples of forms that can be built with this offering include consent waiver or medical history questionnaires. Forms can be directly attached to client profiles and appointments.

Payment Processing

Initially, Boulevard only implemented a payments solution of asking online bookers for their payment information to decrease no-show rates. After realizing the potential value that would accrue from building out a fintech solution, Boulevard continued to add features tailored to the salon industry’s particular needs, making it a centralized platform for clients to file payment information and track purchases.

Boulevard’s platform is multi-merchant compatible for commissioned stylists operating under a larger salon, allowing checkouts to be automatically split into separate deposits.

Source: Boulevard

Salons using Boulevard’s payment solutions have the option to share credit card processing costs with their customers through Boulevard Offset. This decreases processing fees to 1% for the business, though customers are charged an additional 3% fee.

Marketing

Boulevard’s marketing product offering allows customers to produce on-brand email campaigns to boost bookings, brand build, or deepen client relationships. Boulevard provides pre-built templates for newsletters, promotions, announcements, etc. The offering also allows for email automation with automatic client filtering.

POS Hardware

Boulevard offers a payment processing solution designed specifically for salons and spas, as opposed to storefronts or cafes, that it calls the Boulevard Duo. The Duo accepts swipe, dip, and tap cards as well as contactless payment via Google or Apple Pay.

The Boulevard Duo iPad app can be used to collect payment and tips and is designed for easy setup and implementation. Boulevard Duo also includes Europay, Mastercard, and Visa (EMV) protection against credit card fraud, and includes end-to-end encryption. In addition to payment and tip collection iPad Duo app can also be used for client self-check-in and other custom forms.

Precision Scheduling

Boulevard’s Precision Scheduling algorithm incorporates many variables to minimize downtime, including a customer’s previous stylist, appointment durations, the likelihood of lateness/no-showing, and the possibility of double booking. The platform is integrated with its customer-side booking and check-in services, allowing users to manage the waitlist, click into client profiles, and review each employee’s daily schedule. All in all, Boulevard reports a decrease in cancellation and no-show rates among clients by 71%.

Contact Center

Boulevard’s Contact Center offering allows multi-device communication including two-way texting for directly engaging in appointment reminders, confirmations, and rescheduling with clients over text in real-time. It also provides a custom booking line for every location needed and attaches client profiles to any incoming communication via a caller ID feature.

Staff and Sales Reporting

Boulevard automates the data reporting process, allowing stylists to focus on other operations. The staff performance sheets use data pulled directly from Boulevard’s scheduling and payments solutions and calculates key metrics such as staff utilization, total hours, and service count, as well as revenue from tips, products, and services.

Source: Boulevard

Users can also gather and export a similar sales breakdown report. Key metrics include client count, average service/order revenue, and appointment count.

Source: Boulevard

Loyalty & Offers

Boulevard provides customizable loyalty programs and special offers that customers can use to increase client retention and value. Boulevard allows customers to create the parameters for their own point-based rewards systems or special offers. Boulevard also allows customers to create dynamic pricing for limited-time offers that may be created to incentivize customers on slow days and can be automatically applied at checkout or during the self-booking process.

Members & Packages

Boulevard provides customers with the ability to create monthly or annual memberships that automatically renew, allowing for the creation of potentially more predictable recurring revenue.

Customer Relationship Management

The crux of Boulevard’s platform is the data it stores to analyze each customer. In addition to the data needed to schedule a customer (historical visits, past stylist, visit duration, likelihood of no-show/lateness), Boulevard also stores relevant personal information including contact information, pronouns, expected revisit period, social links, and involvement in loyalty programs, allowing clients to strengthen the personal connection they have with their customers.

Source: Boulevard

The platform also has a built-in messaging system for clients to communicate with their customers about upcoming appointments, check-in with customers periodically, and additional one-and-done blast marketing.

Source: Boulevard

Boulevard’s client profiles also track average visit value and past retail purchases, which are used to recommend products for clients upon checkout. Boulevard claims to have increased retail upselling by 18% with this feature.

Users can also create customizable forms such as check-in forms, consent waivers, and medical history questionnaires tailored to each customer’s needs. Relevant forms and their respective data can be stored within each client profile.

Inventory Management

Businesses can manage product pricing and inventory directly on Boulevard’s dashboard. The dashboard can be integrated with Shopify/Quickbooks to easily migrate product lists. By manually adding/importing products into the database, Boulevard automatically tracks purchases and returns on these products.

Source: Boulevard

Customer

Boulevard serves a wide slate of personal wellness and care sectors, including salons, spas, manicurists/pedicurists, medical spas (medspas), and massage therapists.

Source: Boulevard

Boulevard had over 25K professional clients and 2K business customers as of January 2023. Notable customers include franchises like Toni&Guy USA and HeyDay as well as prominent salons like Mèche. Boulevard’s services are used by end consumers including the Kardashians and Shakira.

Boulevard’s platform is accessible to self-run salons as well as chains and franchises, with the most popular subscription servicing individual-led businesses. In recent years, the salon and spa industry has seen a rise in businesses led by individual stylists. Instead of the traditional commission-based model where workers share profits with their salon, individual stylists capitalize on social media-led growth and business software to expand without having to pay overhead expenses. After the pandemic, Boulevard reported an average decrease in staff numbers of 20%, underlining the shift towards smaller, more efficient salons.

Market Size

Among the many impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, one was the growth in interest in health and wellness. Today, over 50% of US consumers report wellness as a top priority in their day-to-day lives, up from 42% in 2020. In the post-pandemic world, growth within the personal care and beauty market could largely be attributed to this shift.

In addition to a general increase in demand for grooming hair, nails, and skin, the lasting effects of digital communication from COVID-19 have heightened perceptions of one’s own online appearance, another key driver within this market. The personal care services market was valued at $402 billion in 2022 and grew at a CAGR of 9.3% to $439.5 billion by 2023. It is expected to reach $610.5 billion by 2027, representing a CAGR of 8.6%.

Salon profit margins typically fall below 10%, and 94% of salons make less than $1 million in ARR. Currently, only 56% of salons use business management software, with the majority of those who do mainly use it for scheduling. This represents significant room for growth for business management software solutions like Boulevard targeted at this industry.

Source: Boulevard

Zenoti: Founded in 2010, Zenoti offers services similar to Boulevard with additional features that enable customer feedback, AI-driven marketing, and solutions for fitness centers, among other components. In June 2021, Zenoti raised $80 million led by TPG in an extension of its Series D the year before, putting it at a $1.5 billion valuation. User reviews suggest that while Zenoti offers more user support, its “value for money” is consistently rated lower than Boulevard. Nonetheless, Zenoti’s platform is more expansive in terms of feature set and industry coverage, and over 25K businesses use Zenoti, 12x more business customers than Boulevard served as of January 2023 (2K).

Booksy: Since its founding in 2013, Booksy has raised $118.7 million in funding. In early 2021, it raised a $70 million Series C after having merged with Versum, allowing it to expand operations into Mexico. Both Booksy and Boulevard offer similar scheduling, point-of-sales payment processing, inventory management, and marketing tools. Based on pricing options, Boulevard is significantly more upmarket-focused, as Booksy’s subscription fees are fixed at $29.99 per month. Given that additional staff members can be added at a rate of $20.00 per month, Booksy likely targets individual and smaller operators as well.

GlossGenius: GlossGenius, founded in 2016, has raised over $44.2 million in funding, with its most recent round as of August 2023 being a $25 million Series B led by Imaginary Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. GlossGenius offers an extensive salon management platform with integrated booking, scheduling, payment processing, and marketing tools. Like Booksy, its monthly subscription fees of $24 to $48 are cheaper than Boulevard, suggesting that it serves fewer upmarket customers.

Fresha: London-based Fresha was founded in 2015 and has raised a total of $185 million. Instead of using a subscription-based business model, Fresha charges users high commission fees for first-time customers on top of payment processing and marketing fees. Additionally, Fresha provides its own booking app instead of integrating online booking into its client’s websites. In this sense, Fresha is more consumer-oriented compared to Boulevard.

Source: Fresha

Boulevard operates on a SaaS business model and offers four different subscription plans that differ depending on client demands.

1. Essentials: This tier costs $175 per month and includes the Precision Scheduling offering for online booking, a business dashboard, integrated point of sale (Duo), a client profile dashboard with 500 free one-time blast emails, and basic reporting capabilities.

2. Premier: Costing $375 per month, this tier provides additional features such as inventory management, multi-merchant transactions, and client check-in or walk-ins.

3. Prestige: At $455 per month, this tier includes the Forms and Chart add-on features, 2.5K free text messages per location per month, and 10K emails per location per month, along with a dedicated customer success manager.

4. Enterprise: Boulevard also offers custom pricing options for larger chains that require multi-location management and enterprise-class marketing software.

Source: Boulevard

In addition to its tiered plans, Boulevard also offers individual add-ons for additional monthly fees.

Source: Boulevard

Boulevard also charges a take rate of 2.65% + $0.15 for credit and debit card processing, with discounts available at volume.

2022 marked the fourth consecutive year of triple-digit YoY growth for Boulevard, in which its ARR grew 122% and its customer base nearly doubled. Boulevard was also listed on Forbes’s Top 500 America’s Best Startup for Employers in 2022, ranking 33rd, and was recognized on the inaugural list of Crunchbase and Nasdaq’s SMBTech 50.

As of 2023, Boulevard processes over $1.5 billion in annual payments and serves over 25K professionals across 2K self-care businesses. CEO Matt Danna has noted that the future of Boulevard likely involves an expansion of its tools and features across different industries.

In August 2022, Boulevard announced that it had raised a $70 million Series C led by Point 72, putting the company’s valuation at $570 million. Following this round, Boulevard’s total capital raised reached $108 million. Other investors in the round included Index Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, and VMG Partners.

Given that Boulevard was processing over $1.5 billion in annual payments by January 2023 at a fixed 2.65% take rate, Boulevard’s payment processing revenue can be estimated to be over $40 million. In addition, assuming Boulevard’s monthly revenue from over 2K businesses averages $325/month, Boulevard’s total ARR as of early 2023 can be estimated to have been around $47.6 million, putting it at a revenue multiple of ~12x.

Personalized Care Services

A key component of Boulevard’s product is the connection it fosters between businesses and their customers. Customer personalization tends to be overlooked in the beauty industry, and PwC reports that 54% of surveyed Americans desire more personalization. Even among personal care services, Boulevard’s extensive customer profiles, particularly social media and customer preference insights, give clients more adequate information to formulate personalized routines and product recommendations.

Downstream Expansion

In an interview, CEO Matt Danna explained the long-term vision of the company as follows: “we really want to make a dent in consumer purchase behavior. Today, Boulevard is very much a B2B business, but we’re looking to be more consumer-facing.” The expansion of its service to be more front-facing may result in a product similar to that of Fresha, which resembles a marketplace for consumers and salons. This approach would add another revenue stream to Boulevard’s current model, simultaneously allowing for greater brand recognition among end customers, and driving overall revenues upward.

Industry and Feature Expansion

The personal care industry is fragmented, with a handful of large competitors scrambling for coverage within a large market of low-value customers. The winners in the market could end up being those that cast the largest net, whether through toolkit expansion or industry coverage. The market is competitive as is: barely half of salons and spas use software, with significantly fewer than half of the market using software for anything apart from scheduling. Should Boulevard fail to expand its services to different industries, it risks falling behind competitors.

Rising Operating Expenses

Due to the cumulative effects of various macroeconomic conditions, many salons have been forced to close or downsize operations throughout the first half of 2023. High energy costs, decreases in disposable income, and rising interest rates during this period disproportionately affected brick-and-mortar businesses. In April 2023, a quarter of salons were operating at a loss. In such economic conditions, many salons struggle to find difficulty in staying open, let alone pay for monthly software. This may hamper Boulevard’s efforts to acquire and retain customers.

Boulevard is capitalizing on the rapidly growing personal care and beauty space. By providing a comprehensive platform that manages scheduling and booking, customer relationships, and internal operations, Boulevard allows small salons to focus on their key services, optimizing the way clients retain and interact with their customers. Moving forward, Boulevard can continue to expand its feature set as it seeks to cement a place within the market.