Booking an appointment for a beauty or wellness service might be a pain due to no availability of specific beauty practitioners or timing, but a startup looking to fill the gap is Bfab, an online platform to book services related to beauty and wellness. If being smart about our time and efforts is one of our 2016 resolutions, perhaps this startup could be one of the ways in which we can start.
All Things Beauty And Wellness
What Bfab essentially provides is a unique form of instant and real time booking availability for niche beautifying services. Raeesa Sya, co-founder of Bfab said, “With this, a completely new way of booking a beauty appointment is born. You can book your appointment at 2am with instant confirmation and be assured to get your treatment. Also you can access real-time calendars of salons and see if you can just stop for a quick manicure next door in the next 30 minutes. It’s a completely new way and new experience!”
The way vendors come on board is by Bfab’s careful selection of the best salons in each category, paying much consideration to the brand awareness, quality of service, referral and brand appearance. Bfab aims to offer their users a wide selection of salons in each category for each area with a certain level of service and quality.
For instance, there are services in salons for hair removal, massage, spa and manicure, just to name a few. Every customer has their own preferred type of services, hence Raeesa mentioned, “Every customer should find a salon suited to his preference, location, brand and price segment”.
In return, for the vendors, Bfab offers 2 main benefits, which is an increase in their brand awareness and online presence. The team also brings them customers which helps to increase their revenue and thus overall financial performance. The vendors are listed on the portal for free, and in this day and age where everything is performed based on the profit received, this can allow vendors who have a try-see attitude to first gain their trust in the portal which is currently in a beta stage.
In The Midst Of Plucking And Waxing
The team made up of Pawel Netreba, Raeesa Sya and Sergey Gaydar shared that they got the idea for Bfab because they saw that there are such platforms in Europe and the United States which connects salons/professionals with customers in order to provide the latter with ultimate convenience, transparency and trust.
“However, when we looked at South East Asia, there were none or not really serious players—or at least not of a considerate size and success. This might be due to a wrong strategy, monetisation model, execution or insufficient investment,” shared Raeesa. As such, the team decided to use and leverage on their knowledge and expertise (they’ve had experience working in foodpanda and Groupon) in order to build an easy-to-use one-stop platform where people can book their appointments instantly for all beauty services.
The way in which Bfab gains revenue is by taking a small percentage cut from each successful booking as a form of remuneration for their efforts. Thus far, the responses have been great and they have managed to sign up almost 200 vendors in just 2 months.
One of the contributors to this speedy success so far is a hardworking team which has worked hard to sign up the vendors. “Our vendors are very helpful and willing to use our system and accept bookings. Some of them have managed to get up to 5 bookings first week we launch,” Raessa shared.
For The Future Of Beautifying
In 2016, they are hoping to provide an even wider selection of salons in different categories such as massage, nails, waxing, hair and more. Raeesa said that the ultimate target would be to get 1,000 vendors in and around the Klang Valley, and their ambition is to go regional to the entire South East Asia in 2 and a half years time. This is so people travelling within the region can actually benefit from using one single platform for all of their beauty and wellness needs.
With the initial backing from the likes of 500 Startups and Khailee Ng, it helps to validate Bfab and makes them a name to look out for in 2016. “Our investors are high caliber and think tanks in the venture capital industry. Having Koichi, Khailee and SaiKit as investors and advisors is not only inspiring but also pushing us to the next level!”
Having a morale boost is a good way to start a business off and Bfab helps to add convenience to an activity which is meant to be relaxing in the first place. With that intact, they can leverage on this key point in order to draw in the social media savvy locals who are just looking to beautify themselves and relax the stresses away.
