Kaylee Fagan/Business Insider
San Francisco-based startup StyleBee allows clients to book appointments with professional cosmeticians and stylists who come to you, not the other way around.
Since it launched four years ago, StyleBee has earned the moniker “Uber for beauty” for its on-demand styling services that can come to you at your office, home, or anywhere you choose.
A slew of these “beauty on-demand” apps have cropped up in the past few years, including New York-based Glamsquad — arguably the most popular — which is now also available in the Bay Area. The salon-less concept is one that’s been around for a while, but the on-demand service via an app is relatively new.
A personal need for one such service arose during a workday recently when I learned that a post-work event I was attending was a tad dressier than I had prepared for. I had packed a change of clothes, but had covered up my bedhead with a hat that morning.
So I booked a conference room in the WeWork building where I work to have a StyleBee stylist come and fix the monstrosity that was my hair.
Here’s how it went.
Though there’s a StyleBee app, I actually ended up using the website for the most part.
StyleBee/Business Insider
Frustratingly, the app crashed multiple times while I was trying to use it. Choose the wrong service and want to go back? Too bad, the app will buffer and you’ll have to start all over. The same thing happened when I needed to correct my credit card number.
I was a little surprised that the app of a company founded in 2014 was basically nonfunctional.
When I first logged on to book a 3:45 PM appointment, I fiddled around before securing my spot — and after a few minutes of idling, my 3:45 PM spot had been taken. I chose the 4 PM spot instead.
But it was actually a weird sense of relief that, despite the wishy-washy app performance, the service I’d enlisted to do my hair up was so in-demand, I had lost an appointment slot.
I proceeded to use the website to book my appointment and to upload a headshot and some reference photos of how I’d like my hair to be styled.
For context, I wanted something easy, off-the-face, and geometric, not unlike Daisy Ridley’s character in the recent “Star Wars” installments. I wasn’t joining an intergalactic resistance that night, but I was on a photo assignment. I needed my hair to behave.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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