Yahoo Finance How Sharmadean Reid plans to revolutionise the beauty industry post-pandemic
Sharmadean Reid is the type of beauty entrepreneur we need in 2020. Following the launch of WAH Nails, her (now closed) nail salon business in 2009, Reid created her app-based beauty service booking platform BeautyStack two years ago and has made it her mission to empower customers and professionals alike ever since. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, that's never been more important.
As beauty professionals were left uncertain and arguably unsupported during the UK lockdown, Reid helped create the #BringBeautyBack campaign in response to pubs and other retailers being allowed to reopen, while the traditionally hygienic environment of the beauty salon remained off limits.
The open letter to the government gave a voice to several beauty professionals, who, despite being part of an industry that contributes over £28 billion annually to the UK economy, felt overlooked in what many perceived as a gendered reopening plan.
There was even a march planned for Saturday 18 July in London to protest the decision to keep close-contact beauty treatments (such as eyebrow threading and facials) off limits, while barbers were allowed to offer beard trims.
"The situation around beauty services reopening after lockdown is completely political," says Reid. "It's to do with the fact that ultimately, this is an industry that the men in parliament don't consume and don't understand. For me, beauty services are empowering because they allow women who contribute massively to the workforce to have flexible, meaningful social work. That's critical. The impact to society is really, really high. You need more people in the room who consume the services, so they can actually make the decisions about them. Unfortunately, we don't have that right now."
A post shared by Sharmadean Reid (@sharmadeanreid) on May 1, 2020 at 9:57am PDT
What we are lucky to have is Reid's powerful voice and advocacy as a Black female entrepreneur, perhaps best summed up in her powerful Medium blog post, explaining why she started BeautyStack back in 2018.
"Whether it’s through talks, workshops, mentoring or simply existing as a Black woman in the business space, the reason I’m on the planet is to let other women know they can do it too, and give them the tools to achieve their goals."
"Women always are hustling and want to work and contribute to society," she explains to Bazaar. "But the key is, 'do we have enough productive business models that enable women to work in the way that they want to work?"
Interestingly, Reid mentions Avon as a past inspiration: a beauty brand, built on door-to-door selling, that recently announced a 114 per cent rise year-on-year in new representatives signing up across the UK.
"When you were growing up in the hood, Avon was the way that you were able to make money and connect with other women," says Reid. "The idea of going to their house, having a chat and showing them the products; it was really inspiring. Avon was social selling before social selling was a thing. They provided a system and an opportunity for women to earn their own money."
A post shared by Sharmadean Reid (@sharmadeanreid) on Oct 24, 2019 at 10:12am PDT
"Now though, what is the beauty tech equivalent that truly allows individuals to work the way that they want to work? If someone wants to drive a taxi, there's Uber, to utilise your spare room, there's Airbnb, and if someone wants to ride a motorcycle all day, join Deliveroo. But, for beauty, I'm not sure there is one. Why do we not have a tech platform that enables and powers the beauty gig economy in the way we do for more masculine areas? The real reason: there's not enough women building tech."
Enter Reid's own beauty tech platform, BeautyStack. It's a beauty bookings app that not only helps customers find the exact services they are looking for, but also empowers the beauty pros who drive the industry to boost their platform, making them the new trend influencers. With lines increasingly blurred between beauty and wellness too, it caters for all your needs - from facials and hairstyling to reiki, taro and massage; the complete wellbeing package.
"Social media has created incredible tools for people who have fashion brands and beauty product businesses, but when it goes to beauty services, the algorithms do not work to help you get discovered and booked," Reid explains. "That's what BeautyStack is about: discovery and booking through content.”
"For example, on Instagram, you can't properly search for a beauty professional by location. You can't say, 'I want to book nails in Sweden tomorrow. What you have to do is search for #nailssweden and hope that a cool girl has tagged a good technician. If you remember the old WAH Nails Instagram, we had about 4,000 pictures, but you couldn't look through them for every single marble nail we ever did or go through the feed by sorting and searching it for a style. BeautyStack allows you to do that."
"Social media also tends to only really prioritise accounts with high follower counts when actually with beauty services the insights are different. You might only be able to fit five people into the salon a day, so you don't need 1000 followers to be running a successful business. My goal is to make a social network that you can transact from for beauty and wellness services whatever their size."
A post shared by Sharmadean Reid (@sharmadeanreid) on Apr 9, 2020 at 11:50am PDT
In the post-Covid world, tools like BeautyStack are arguably even more important, particularly for smaller beauty beauty businesses, who have suffered significantly during lockdown. Reid's hope is that they will not only survive but thrive, given the right support.
"My whole plan for the next three months is that BeautyStack becomes the platform that gets the beauty businesses back to work. My mission is to answer the question, 'how can we reinvigorate the service economy using not only technology, but community and customer support?."
"Even pre-Covid, I was predicting the death of the salon over the next decade, but if you can cultivate and curate your own client list and really, really nail the communication, then you don't need walk-ins, do you? That means there's more room for people to become independent practitioners, who can curate their own beauty spaces, so they don't have to be on the high street. I actually think that what the pandemic has shown us is that there has to be new ways of working. And that applies to the beauty industry, too."
A post shared by Sharmadean Reid (@sharmadeanreid) on Nov 1, 2019 at 12:29pm PDT
Social media, as with the future of a lot of industries, arguably has a role to play in such a visual and connection-driven space, but Reid suggests there's more to it than that.
"It's not so much social media that's important; you have to split those two words up. There's the social network, which is word of mouth and the fact that people want to know what their friends are doing. That social aspect originated in salon culture and the word 'salon' is all about people getting together to talk about ideas. So, salons to me were the original social network."
"The second word, social media, that's about content. Beauty is a visual activity, so of course, there should be content driven around it. But, social networks don't directly translate to cash because you can't book a picture. And that's the missing link that I'm trying to solve [with BeautyStack]."
For someone who truly seems to understand what the industry needs going forward, Reid was actually something of an accidental beauty entrepreneur - not because she didn't recognise the strong potential of her business ideas, but because beauty wasn't her passion growing up.
"I wasn't that into beauty until I opened the WAH nail salon. I was always into fashion. I had the idea to open a nail salon because I loved going to hip hop gigs and getting my nails done. And it was through getting my nails done and hip hop culture that I learnt about this alternative world, which was the beauty industry. I remember, in fashion, no one used to care about beauty. It was the back pages, skipped before the ads and I was like, "no, no, no, this is way more valuable. It actually makes so much more money and contributes so much."
"I really love the beauty industry as a vehicle to just learn about women's lives. Let's say you're sitting on the bus, which is another place where you might be with a stranger for an hour; you don't start chatting about your lives. There's something about the salon that breaks down all barriers and suddenly, you know, someone's life story. I love the salon for creating that space for women to get together and truly share experiences. I just don't feel that there is another space like it."
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