Beauty & wellness startup Stylofie.com raises seed round of US $ 250K from Hong Kong based Swastika Co Ltd

Styofie is an online market place through which consumers can discover salons and spas near them, read up review and ratings of services, compare prices and get discounts every time they do online booking through the app or site. Currently they are operational in Gurgaon and have over 100+ premium salon/spaoutlets listed with them.
 
Stylofie was founded by 2 MDI, Gurgaon graduates – Prateek Agarwal (ex- Airtel, Videocon, Telecom Oman) and Saurav Dey (ex-Ingersoll-Rand, Accenture, Genpact) over a midnight conversation on starting something of their own. Both had climbed up the corporate ladder pretty fast and were looking at the next level of challenges in their professional journey.

The startup journey for the duo was an interesting one, as they zeroed on their chosen sector of building a company. 


“I am an avid spa visitor, and discovering a new spa was always a problem for me due to dearth of information online,” said Prateek.  

They did a short survey among people only to realize there were many more like Prateek who were resistant to try out places due to lack of awareness about the facility, experiences, costs, etc. 

“If you look closely at the beauty and wellness industry, you will realize that it is primarily offline with bundled deals getting peddled on online deal platforms. From a consumer perspective, think about long waiting times on weekend, lack of a standardized review/rating mechanism for discovery & non availability of rate cards online – all pain points which called out for a solution,” Saurav added.

Stylofie provides a technology platform for discovery, comparison, reviews, payment and booking – all rolled into one website and mobile app for consumers.  Stylofie lets customers pick the beauty treatment of their choice, select their location and the salon they want to visit, choose a date and time according to their convenience and book the services. Their core value proposition is that they reward customers for online booking of their salon / spa session with some fabulous discounts. 

“Stylofie is among the few start-ups which launched its website and mobile app (including android & ios) together. We are applying Lean Startup principles for development, allowing us to be very agile and responsive to consumer needs”, added Balaji, CTO Stylofie.

Stylofie has also differentiated itself by hiring industry/domain experts in their teams for different various positions.  They hired key people like Puneet who is ex-L’Oreal and Atul who used to manage a large salon chain in NCR, who brought unique insights and nuances about the industry.  

This helped the Stylofie team build credibility with Salon owners, as they referenced pain points in a common language.  They currently have a team of 10 people across Supplier Enablement, Customer Delight & Software Development. 

“In the start-up ecosystem while technology rules, often domain skills are underplayed. We wanted our employees to think through things before they propose a solution, which is why we made sure that someone with the right knowledge joined us,” said Prateek.