Case study · Hair Cuttery
A booking channel that was sending customers back to the phone.
Hair Cuttery is the largest privately held salon company in the United States. Its app, the primary digital route into a business that runs on appointments, was rated 2.5 stars. We rebuilt it, and left salon operations alone on purpose.
The measurable result
- Booking volume
Through the app, since the rebuild.
+100% - Monthly users
Also doubled over the same period.
70,000 - App Store rating
28,000 ratings, up from 2.5 stars.
4.9★ - Google Play rating
2.67K reviews and over 100,000 installs, up from 2.2 stars.
4.8★
A booking app at 2.5 stars is not a marketing problem.
Around 5,000 employees work across the Hair Cuttery salon network, and the business runs on appointments. Every booking that failed was a chair that sat empty and a customer who rang the salon instead, moving work back onto staff who were already serving the person in front of them.
Four groups of systems already running the business.
- Backend salon operations
The scheduling and capacity systems that decide what can actually be booked.
- Analytics
So the behaviour of the booking funnel could be seen rather than guessed at.
- Reliability tooling
So failures surfaced as signal instead of as one-star reviews.
- Marketing systems
Handed to Hair Cuttery’s marketing team, so they control how the business reaches its own customer base.
The constraint was architectural, not cosmetic.
Reliability, speed and the booking flow were all downstream of a platform that could not support them. Patching screens would never carry the app from 2.5 stars to four; it would only spend a year proving that. Four priorities came out of it, in order.
The operation first. The interface second.
- 01Make the operation more efficient
- 02Make it easier for customers to book
- 03Simplify the experience
- 04Increase reliability
A white-sheet rebuild on a modernised architecture.
Delivered by a team of three, Rishabh leading two engineers, working directly with Hair Cuttery’s Chief Technology Officer. Advanced booking operations followed, including upsells and add-ons that raise revenue per booking rather than chasing more bookings.
We rebuilt the app. We did not rebuild how 5,000 people work.
The rebuild was deliberately confined to the consumer-facing application. It did not automate stylist scheduling, override salon capacity, or change how work reaches the floor. The people running each salon kept the judgment they already had, and the app was built to fit around it, not because their operations were out of reach but because changing them was not what the problem called for. That is why the app was adopted rather than resisted.
The client owns it, runs it, and is still building on it.
HC Salon Holdings owns the application. The relationship is in its fifth year and continues, with Think Spherical working alongside the client’s CTO rather than in place of him. The durability is checkable without taking our word for it: both apps are still in the stores, still updated and still rated above 4.8, years after the rebuild shipped.
The same pattern, extended inward.
An internal application for approximately 5,000 employees. AI booking tools built into existing workflows. And making the business findable and bookable through AI assistants, so the channel keeps working as customers change how they search.
Bring us the channel that is underperforming
Find out whether the problem is the surface or the structure.
We’ll connect the evidence, establish the baseline and tell you whether a rebuild is warranted, or whether something smaller will do.
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