In case you’ve ever traveled in rural areas in France, you could have realized a French peculiarity. Even within the seemingly much less populated cities, there’s a hair salon.

French startup Planity has been benefiting from France’s love affair with hair salons to launch a SaaS product for these companies particularly. Over time, the corporate expanded to different forms of magnificence salons, similar to barbers and nail salons.

And it has been working surprisingly properly as there are actually greater than 40,000 small companies counting on Planity for appointment reserving and extra. In actual fact, the startup just lately raised a €45 million Sequence C spherical ($48 million at at present’s alternate fee) in a spherical led by InfraVia Capital Companions with present traders Crédit Mutuel Innovation, Revaia and Bpifrance’s Digital Enterprise fund additionally taking part.

Planity’s trajectory is an fascinating one provided that it isn’t the primary huge European tech firm making an attempt to simplify magnificence salon appointment reserving. Particularly, Treatwell is already dwell in a dozen European nations and had seemingly captured the digitization alternative of this extremely fragmented market.

Doctolib for magnificence salons

So what’s completely different with Planity? The startup’s co-founder and CEO Antoine Puymirat first began engaged on on-line appointment reserving in 2007. His first startup referred to as ClicRDV was a white-label on-line reserving answer for all kinds of companies. It was acquired by Pages Jaune (now SoLocal).

After a number of years working for SoLocal, he left the corporate and went again to the drafting board with a extra targeted method. As an alternative of making an all-encompassing appointment answer, he selected to concentrate on magnificence salons particularly.

Across the identical time, Doctolib was beginning to take off. The French startup, which is now a unicorn, has utterly modified appointment reserving for medical doctors and different health-related jobs. Its influence is even larger than that because it has profoundly modified how French individuals take care of well being points.

Planity drew some inspiration from Doctolib. It’s a SaaS platform that utterly replaces the nice outdated paper pocket book that was extensively utilized in hair salons. When individuals name for an appointment, workers write down the appointment in Planity instantly. And, after all, individuals may also e-book appointments on-line by means of Planity’s app and web site. It turns into the one supply of fact and simplifies salon administration.

In contrast to Treatwell, Planity doesn’t cost a fee on every future sale. As an alternative, Planity is a standard SaaS product with a month-to-month subscription charge. The primary product presently prices €69 per thirty days. (With a little bit back-of-the-envelope calculation, it signifies that Planity probably generates tens of tens of millions of euros in annual recurring income.)

“Many of the present gamers have adopted a standard market mannequin just like the certainly one of Reserving.com or TheFork,” Antoine Puymirat instructed me. “Shoppers pay a share of the full quantity of every reservation. However we realized that this mannequin wasn’t working as some corporations have been round for 15 years, however they by no means actually reached a major scale in Europe.”

In accordance with him, the primary problem is that the majority prospects are returning prospects. And also you don’t need to pay a fee each time they e-book an appointment. With Planity, the extra your prospects use it to e-book appointments on-line, the much less time you waste on the cellphone — and it doesn’t value you extra. That’s why magnificence salons encourage their prospects to make use of Planity.

“We go a bit additional than that. We additionally let our companies handle working hours. Workers can clock out and in within the morning and within the night. We deal with holidays. We will export payroll data,” Puymirat mentioned.

Each month, round eight million individuals go to Planity. The platform handles round 10 million bookings per thirty days — 4 million of them are booked instantly by the top prospects on Planity. Different appointments are entered manually by workers when a buyer is speaking to them instantly.

The platform handles ready lists, ship reminders by way of textual content messages and creates a personalised schedule for every worker. Planity may also change the point-of-sales answer for an extra €20 per thirty days.

Some purchasers additionally get fee terminals from Planity. In that case, Planity makes use of Stripe’s APIs for the fee stack and takes a small minimize on every transaction. However small outlets which are already working with their financial institution for his or her fee terminals can preserve utilizing these terminals.

Up subsequent, the corporate plans to deal with wellbeing and health facilities. Planity’s important market stays France — its house nation — however the firm is beginning to develop in Belgium and Germany.

Along with the fragmentation of the sweetness salon business, there’s a barrier to entry to create a Planity competitor. The corporate has a big gross sales group. They go and meet new purchasers to guarantee that they perceive how the software program platform works.

This technique is each capital intensive and requires a stable gross sales playbook to work. There are presently round 200 gross sales individuals working for Planity, and the corporate plans to rent much more.