Be U Salons launches India's first subscription model

New Delhi : Be U Salons launched its disruptive annual subscription model (under two variants Gold and Silver) for its loyal customers to incentivise them for being the early adopters of the new-age salon chain and strengthening their bond with their customers further, not for a few visits, but forever.

Be U Salons is changing the way people avail services in salons in India for last one year by standardising the salon service standards and disrupting the service price points at its 85 partner salons in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru market.

Under the Gold variant, a customer can pay Rs 1,699 once and enjoy their favourite services worth Rs 500 per month for free, for one year, at any Be U outlet in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru (Be U is estimated to cross 200 salons by the end of this year). The offer will work on top of the existing deals and offers across the partner salons, which is what makes it "TOO HOT TO MISS!"

When we look at the customer and salon owner situation in the market today, on one hand, every customer wants to get their maintenance services done at a salon every month, but they end up compromising because of budgetary constraints. More often than not, they visit multiple salons in search of the best deals.

On the other hand, the salon owner charges certain price points because they know that they have access to a limited number of customers every month. Now both these concerns can be solved if the customer is offered full month's maintenance services at a subsidised price, that too, on a branded platform in return for their full year's commitment. This way the salon gets access to two to three times more customers because of the subsidised prices, which allows them to utilise their ideal capacity and earn more profits.

"On an average, in cities like Delhi and Bengaluru, a regular salon-going woman spends Rs 12,000-18,000 a year on salon expenses. We are underwriting Rs 6,000 (market value of Rs 12,000) of this spend at Rs 1,699 a year, where the customer can redeem any services worth Rs 500 per month at any of our 85 branches in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru, for a year. This way we also end up capturing the customers' spend above the Rs 500 mark in the months when they choose to go for bigger services, which works as an added advantage to our salon partners," said Jigyasa Gupta, COO, Be U Salons.

"Currently, we are aiming to onboard 300 subscribers per month through this scheme, which can go up to 3,000 subscribers per month by the end of the year. This will allow us to have one-third of the total salon revenue to come through subscribers by the end of 12 months of on-boarding a salon," he added.

Be U claims that the first year of their operations (2017) was Phase 1, where they tried and tested their product while establishing the base infrastructure. The second year (2018) would be Phase 2, which is all about scaling the business model.

"We standardised the supply (partner salons) and almost doubled their capacity utilisation levels within 12 months of on-boarding them through service standardisation, centralised marketing and price correction in Phase 1, but they still have a lot more capacity lying vacant, ready to be sold. Hence, now it's time to launch our long-awaited Subscription Model, which is a disruptive model and a win-win situation for the end customers and the salon owners, mediated by Be U. This will further help us reduce the burden on customer acquisition costs (CAC), which is one of the largest cost to any consumer business. This will help us reconstruct the way this largely unorganised market works," said Vikas Johari, CEO, Be U Salons.

The supporting credit to all the exciting action in this sector can be given to the enormous digitisation that India as a nation has witnessed in the last two years, with likes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the JIO wave working as the true trigger point to it. So a segment expert's true vision and the ability to replace the fractured traditional infrastructure through seamless and evolving tech infrastructure is what it takes to really revolutionise the sector as a whole.

"We invested last year to create the base tech infrastructure and to test our model, and it has worked wonders for the end customers. Today, a customer at Be U Salon can discover nearby salons, do price comparison, explore profiles of multiple artists, book, reschedule or cancel appointments, give real-time feedback, choose from multiple modes of payment, manage their transaction/profile archive, all from a click of a button. This was long overdue because it's no more a luxury but a necessity in today's digital age. Our Subscription Model, backed by our tech-enabled infrastructure, will take the market by a storm and will completely change the way a customer consumed salon services," said IIT Roorkee alumni, Shailendra Nagvani, CTO, Be U Salons.