Beauty Tech is a rapidly growing field that merges the beauty industry with technology to create innovative and personalized solutions for consumers. From smart mirrors to virtual try-on tools, beauty tech is transforming the way we think about beauty products and services.
This field continues to grow and evolve, and we expect to see even more exciting innovations in the beauty industry, as a new startup in our community brings. Stilio is about efficient salons management and more. We discussed about it with Veronica Covali – its co-founder.
Startup Moldova: Hello Veronica! We are very aimpressed about Stilio and already use the platform. Could you please briefly describe the startup and its product.
Veronica: Stilio is an all-in-one platform and booking app designed for Beauty industry in Moldova and at a later stage expanded internationally. The web platform offers a complete solution for all beauty service providers: a platform to show off their services and a direct way to book online appointments. It is also a digital way of managing their own bookings by switching from pen and notebook to an online method. With its current features we reduce the time spent while creating bookings, provide them with relevant analytics and keeping customers informed about the appointments via sms confirmation and reminders sent out. The platform also contains a Job section where beauty specialists can search and apply for Jobs at top salons.
Startup Moldova: What makes you special? What is your competitive advantage?
Veronica: We come to solve 3 main issues:
- Make beauty services easy discoverable and instantly accessible by consumers
- Provide a digital way to manage bookings, employees and salon for beauty providers
- Provide an HR solution for Salons to advertise and find right specialists.
Startup Moldova: Where did the idea for this startup come from? From what necessity?
Veronica: Currently in Moldova it is very hard to find a good salon without recommendations from friends or other people. Social media channels like facebook or instagram do not provide a search tool to discover them. Furthermore, today’s world is changing and we have less time now than before. Calling a salon to make bookings may not always be a good solution due to lack of time. However, having a possibility to make books yourself on your phone after 10 pm is way more handy and simple.
Moldova was in need of a digital solution and we chose the Beauty sector and every single person living in Moldova needs at least one beauty service. In this way we get to help more people with just one idea.
Startup Moldova: What were the biggest difficulties you faced on the way?
Veronica: In Moldova you can see two type of people, those who cannot live without tech solutions and those who have very poor knowledge of it. The moment we launched the platform we had to first change the mentality that a modern tech solution can make our life better, be it personal or professional one. A lot of training was done and pretty much skepticism was felt during our conversations with salons. But in the end slowly, slowly they started to open-up and try it more. More bookings were created via the platform and now we have salons and beauty specialists using it day by day as well as regular consumers that come to our website or mobile app to book appointments.
We consider the hard part is behind us now and we move towards enhancing our product to bring more efficiency for the beauty sector in Moldova.
Startup Moldova: What is the target customer segment for you? Do you already have real customers?
Veronica: We have two types of clients: beauty service consumers and salons/individual Beauty specialists.
At the moment we have over 430 salons and beauty specialists registered on our platform, monthly we record around 1k bookings. We offer Freemium subscription as well as paid ones for more services and options. At the moment we have 20 customers with a paid subscription, and this was achieved in only 2 weeks since we launched the additional packages.
Our database continues to grow daily. Both beauty providers registered as well as Beauty service consumers that book appointments. We are very satisfied of the results we achieved in only 6 months from the official launch in Moldova.
Our platform is open for the beauty sector in the entire country but the biggest number of profiles registered are from Chisinau. We hope other cities will expand more in the future as well.
Startup Moldova: Please introduce us to your team.
Veronica: We are a young team and dynamic. We have full time employees as well as contractors that help us the moment:
- Sorin Boistean – Administrator and Product Owner
- Dan Cornilov – CTO & Software architect
- Veronica Covali – Sales & Marketing Coordinator
- Andrei Gorbatovschi – Full-stack developer
- Ruxanda Vasilciuc – Customer Manager
- Anna Scoropat – Customer Manager
- Constantin Popescu – Web designer
- Ștefan – Web designer
The rest are contractors: 5 specialists
Startup Moldova: What growth and development plans do you have for the future?
Veronica: This year will be dedicated to stabilizing the platform and app on the Moldovan Market and start working on premises to expand the app furthermore to other countries. There is a clear roadmap we designed as what next features will be added in order to bring unique experience and efficiency to everyone choosing our solution.
The feedback of our current clients helps us develop the product which will make a difference in the beauty industry not only from Moldova but outside its borders too.
Startup Moldova: Veronica, we wish you much success to achieve what you have planned, and we invite our readers to follow you on Instagram and to download your app.
#CunoașteComunitatea is an article series of Startup Moldova through which we introduce you to startups from Moldova.
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