Challenge

GlossGenius helps tens of thousands of beauty and wellness entrepreneurs run their small businesses with a suite of easy, intuitive, and powerful business, marketing, and payments solutions. The company wanted to avoid cobbling together a set of disparate solutions, which can cause development pain and frustrating, disconnected experiences for merchants. To create a seamless merchant experience, GlossGenius turned to Stripe as its payments platform.

“Running a small business can be challenging when your back office is scattered across a bunch of point solutions and you have little time left to focus on what you really love doing,” said Danielle Cohen-Shohet, founder and CEO of GlossGenius. “We’re helping our merchants make more money by consolidating all of those systems, helping them understand what they’re doing and where they need to go, and giving them more insights and control to realise their entrepreneurial dreams.”

GlossGenius launched in 2015, with Cohen-Shohet choosing Stripe Connect as an easy-to-deploy payments platform. The company’s full-featured offering helped GlossGenius become Beauty Launchpad’s top readers’ choice for salon software in 2019. As the company became one of the fastest-growing solutions for beauty and wellness entrepreneurs – growing from 50 to over 1,200 active merchants in just one month – it looked to add even more capabilities for its customers. A top priority was to give merchants more ways to personalise their businesses with easy customisations and flexible payments options. GlossGenius also wanted to help merchants avoid the revenue management complexity of cash and hard-to-track peer-to-peer payments.

Solution

With customisation and flexibility in mind, GlossGenius knew Stripe’s ease-of-use and configuration capabilities would fit its payments needs. It continued utilising Stripe Connect to integrate payments into its solutions, which enabled merchants to focus on growing their businesses while Stripe handled Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. GlossGenius also utilised Stripe Billing to easily bill its subscription customers and Stripe Terminal to build customised in-person checkout experiences and offer merchants an array of stylish and sleek card readers. These Stripe-powered card readers connect seamlessly to the GlossGenius app to provide fast access to cash as well as end-to-end encryption, native support for chip cards and contactless payments – including Apple Pay and Google Pay – and protection against liability for counterfeit fraud.

For even more flexibility, GlossGenius also used Tap to Pay on iPhone and Stripe Terminal SDK, so merchants can accept in-person, contactless payments with just an iPhone. It’s an easy, secure, and private way to accept payments across the salon space without maintaining traditional payments hardware.

“Stripe’s ease-of-use, reliability, and configuration capabilities let us build an infrastructure our way, while giving merchants the power to do things their way,” added Cohen-Shohet. “Stripe Connect is really great in onboarding merchants and letting them create their own experiences, while in-person payments with Stripe Terminal gives merchants an integrated omnichannel experience so they have one less thing to worry about.”

Results

Stripe’s powerful and flexible payments products provide the scale, customisation, and reliability necessary for GlossGenius – and its customers – to continue its rapid pace of growth.

Over $1 billion in transactions built on flexibility and a comprehensive suite of features

GlossGenius has helped beauty and wellness entrepreneurs manage more than $1 billion in transactions, adding more merchants in 2021 than it did in the previous four years combined. That growth was made possible in part because Stripe offered the flexibility and easy customisations creative entrepreneurs demand, while giving GlossGenius deep insights to better understand what merchants need to grow their businesses.

“We’re trying to reliably provide infrastructure for merchants to facilitate payments with their own clients, but we’re also looking for a more holistic offering across payments and subscriptions,” said Cohen-Shohet. “It’s all there and available for us on Stripe and that was really important.”

Thousands of customers using new in-person payments options like Tap to Pay on iPhone

GlossGenius knows the importance of in-person payments at beauty and wellness businesses. Stripe Terminal provides an omnichannel experience while being tightly integrated with other Stripe products so merchants can view their entire business from a single platform. The demand for in-person payments was clear, with GlossGenius customers using over 50,000 Terminal devices to accept in-person payments in the past year. And for stylists who don't want to buy or maintain traditional hardware, GlossGenius was able to offer simple and flexible payments with Tap to Pay on iPhone and Stripe Terminal SDK. Tap to Pay on iPhone allows users to accept contactless, in-person payments with just an iPhone – a simple and popular way to accept payments with minimal effort. In fact, 45% of Tap to Pay on iPhone users at GlossGenius had never used traditional payment hardware before.

Cohen-Shohet said, “Stripe Terminal gives our merchants an integrated omnichannel experience so they have one less thing to worry about.”

Foundation for future financial services offerings

GlossGenius saw that Stripe shared its long-term vision to bring more financial options to small business owners. Seeing the potential value of integrated financial services such as Stripe Issuing and Stripe Capital gave GlossGenius additional confidence to expand its relationship with Stripe.