How to do this.

As you may have heard on our last podcast Joe has convinced me to apply for Dragons Den. After some deliberation I thought I would document the process.

  1. Get Application now I don’t know why maybe the application dates have passed but even though the stupid BBC have the link to download the “STATE OF THE ART” word document to apply. It didn’t work. First headache was I managed to download the data in the doc but none of my WORD programs would open it up. Apart from one. Good old NOTEPAD.
  2. Fill in the Forms Having extracted the text to a new document. I then wrote the following “executive summary” which I thought was quite good so I included it here;
  3. Send the Forms Now having done a little research, there are thousands of people that apply to dragons den every year. So i thought we need a way to hack the application list. I reached out to my contacts that may or may not work in or around the BBC.
gosalon logo

Good Evening Dragons!

When thinking about GoSalon we set out to create a solution to one problem.

“Why are clients NOT buying products from their hair & beauty professionals?” 

We did some research and found that 8 out of 10 customers would purchase a product from their stylist, but only if the price was closer to the internet. (Salon products typically have a 40% mark up when you purchase from a salon compared to some online retailers).

The problem wasn’t that clients had not stopped buying retail products, just stopped buying them from salons. There are many reasons for this which I could go into but I’ll spare you the details.

Hair & Beauty industry in the UK is worth £28bn pounds and it’s not under threat from automation or robots anytime soon which means the salon will still demand space on the high street. 

So we thought if salons could utilise their physical space and have the consistent attention from a loyal clientele, we could help them create a viable online business which works seamlessly with their physical one. 

With 250,000 self employed & 500,000 employed hair & beauty professionals in the UK combined with approximately 50000 salons. With the addition of ten’s of thousands of new apprentices every year. We believe we have the foundation to create a long term business solution for hundreds of thousands of people.

We believe we make retail easy for the consumer but we know we make it easy for the owner, distributor and manufacturer. 

GoSalon was born – Although we are still in the Beta stage of developing our software. We have built a prototype app and are currently building the foundations of a large physical affiliate network.
This network seamlessly connects all of these people, from the beauty professional, the online distributor, the manufacturer and the consumer. We are a conduit to all of these businesses and we are determined to make retail easy. 

Buckminster Fuller once said

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

This is what I believe we can do with GoSalon. We have one job – Make retail easy. And that’s what we plan to do.

Long Term Business – With 250,000 self employed & 500,000 employed hair & beauty professionals in the UK combined with approximately 50000 salons. With the addition of ten’s of thousands of new apprentices every year. We believe we have the foundation to create a long term business solution for hundreds of thousands of people.

Industry Value – The Hair & Beauty industry in the UK is worth £6.6bn pounds (services) add in retail and that figure rises to £28bn and it’s not under threat from automation or robots anytime soon which means the salon will still demand space on the high street.

Potential value of the network – if we were to capture 1% of the hair and beauty retail industry (£22bn) in the UK. Potentially we have a business facilitating £22 million pounds of retail transactions per year.

With the opportunity to roll it out across the globe.

As a hairdresser myself I know how hard everyone works to make it in this industry. They create so much unseen value in terms of feeling good, confidence, happiness and self esteem.

I believe that those that create value should be rewarded. And with GoSalon that is what I am determined to do.

If you want to help us change the future of salons and have a say in how we can re imagine them digitally. Then please learn more here

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