And it’s been working surprisingly well, with over 40,000 small businesses now using Planity for appointment booking and other services. The business has raised a €45 million Series C investment ($48 million at today’s exchange rate) headed by InfraVia Capital Partners, with existing investors Crédit Mutuel Innovation, Revaia, and Bpifrance’s Digital Venture fund participating..
Planity’s journey is intriguing, given that it isn’t the only major European digital startup attempting to ease beauty shop appointment scheduling. Treatwell, in particular, is currently operational in a dozen European nations and appears to have capitalized on the digitization opportunity in this highly fragmented sector.
Doctolib is for beauty salons.
So, what distinguishes Planity? The startup’s co-founder and CEO, Antoine Puymirat, began working on online appointment scheduling in 2007. His initial venture, ClicRDV, offered a white-label online booking solution to a wide range of industries. It was purchased by PagesJaune (now SoLocal).
After a few years at SoLocal, he quit the company and restarted with a more concentrated strategy. Rather than developing a comprehensive appointment solution, he elected to concentrate on beauty salons particularly.
Doctolib was also gaining popularity around this time. The French business, which is now a unicorn, has revolutionized appointment scheduling for doctors and other health-care professionals. Its impact is far greater than that, since it has fundamentally altered how French people approach health concerns.
Planity took influence from Doctolib. It’s a SaaS platform that totally replaces the traditional paper notebooks that were commonly used in hair salons. When a customer calls for an appointment, employees record it in Planity directly. People can also schedule appointments online using Planity’s app and website. It becomes the sole source of truth, simplifying salon management.
Unlike Treatwell, Planity does not collect a commission for each subsequent sale. Instead, Planity is a standard SaaS application that requires a monthly subscription cost. The primary product now costs €69 per month. (According to a rough estimate, Planity produces tens of millions of euros in recurring revenue each year.)
“Most of the existing players have adopted a traditional marketplace model like the one of Booking.com or TheFork. Clients pay a percentage of the total price for each reservation. But we saw that this approach was not working because some companies had been around for 15 years but had never achieved substantial traction in Europe.”
Antoine Puymirat, Co-founder and CEO
The fundamental issue is that the majority of clients are repeat customers. You don’t want to pay a commission every time they schedule an appointment. The more your customers use Planity to make appointments online, the less time you spend on the phone – and at no additional expense. This is why beauty salons urge their clients to utilize Planity.
“We go a little further than that. We also allow our firms set their own working hours. Employees can log in and out both in the morning and evening. We handle vacations. “We can export payroll data,” Puymirat explained.
Each month, around eight million people visit Planity. The platform processes around 10 million bookings per month, with 4 million of them made directly by end users on Planity. Other appointments are entered manually by personnel when a customer speaks with them directly.
The technology manages waiting lists, sends text message reminders, and generates a personalized calendar for each employee. Planity can also replace the POS solution for an additional €20 per month.
Planity also provides payment terminals to some of its clients. In such instance, Planity leverages Stripe’s APIs for the payment stack and charges a small fee on each transaction. Small shops, on the other hand, can continue to use payment terminals provided by their bank.
Next, the organization intends to handle wellness and fitness centers. Planity’s major market is France, its home country, although the company is expanding into Belgium and Germany. In addition to the fragmentation of the beauty salon business, there is a barrier to entry for establishing a Planity competitor. The corporation employs a sizable sales crew. They go to meet with prospective clients to ensure that they understand how the software platform operates.
This technique is both capital-intensive and requires a strong sales playbook to succeed. Planity now employs roughly 200 salespeople, with ambitions to hire more.
