Buzz cuts paired with custom designer coffee? The modern barbershop, according to a startup

When quaint barbershops started to mushroom three years ago, there was a surge of modern men seeking clean, classic, and dapper hair styles.

But the huge patronage also presented a problem: suddenly businesses needed to accommodate more customers while walk‑in customers fought over slots. Men could line up for a couple of hours and still end up unaccommodated.

Some barbershops in the metro are addressing this issue by going beyond the usual over‑the‑phone booking process with the help of BaseUp, a tech startup that provides small businesses with an online booking system.

Established two years ago, BaseUp is the brainchild of three young men—Carlos Salazar, Jeph Fernandez, and Gino Gervasio—who had their fair share of complaints about the cost and process of getting their hair done.

“We all spent some time in the U.S. where haircuts are rather expensive,” Salazar told SparkUp in an interview. “So when we came to the Philippines, we looked forward to getting a haircut.”

The first thing they did was to Google the hippest barbershops in town. Unsatisfied with the results, they solicited recommendations from friends, and proceeded to make phone calls to the shops.

But eventually, hope was snipped: lines were almost always busy, and if they did reach someone, the response was only that they were already fully‑booked for the day.

Come 2016, in the middle of developing a booking platform for a fitness space, the team realized that the same model could also work for the beauty and grooming industry.

Their first capital? Their own individual skill sets. Salazar held an MBA from F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, U.S., and previously worked for a family business, developing and operating a system that allowed multinational clients to order products like business cards online. Fernandez worked at American corporate communications firm The Berman Group creating graphic designs for clients like Intel and HP. Gervasio, meanwhile, whose expertise is in the field of computer science, previously developed IT infrastructure for machine learning platforms of a network security group also based in the States.

“That’s when we started playing ideas on what kinds of solutions we could create for businesses in the service industry,” he said. “We wanted to focus on the experience of a customer when dealing with small businesses. And we started with answering the question, ‘How do we help potential customers find them?’ We found that there weren’t a lot of solutions out there that help businesses do this.”

Imagine going to a barbershop and they know that you like GQ Magazine, so by the time you come in, there’s GQ Magazine and maybe a cup of your favorite coffee.

In rolling out its booking system, the company incorporates the BaseUp widget to a client’s existing website or Facebook page. Businesses that have no website can utilize a customized landing page that can immediately take appointments from desktop or mobile.

At present, the platform has 7,500 users nationwide. It has generated more than 21,000 bookings for quaint barbershops including the more popular Felipe and Sons in Manila, and TUF barbershop in Cebu.

Aside from a booking platform, BaseUp also provides its clients with business analytics that indicates the number of new and returning customers, the strongest and weakest days of the week, and products or services to cut from their line of offerings.

“As we talk to business owners, we realized that the more information that they have about their business, the better that they will be able to run and even expand it,” said Gervasio. “Just looking at the top line revenue isn’t enough anymore.”

PERSONALIZED SERVICE

BaseUp also allows its users to know their customers’ behavior through a customer relationship management support, a tool that analyzes a customers’ quirks and presents their preferences.

“Imagine going to a barbershop and they know that you like GQ Magazine, so by the time you come in, there’s GQ Magazine and maybe a cup of your favorite coffee,” he added. “It’s really like a personalized experience. That’s where we also help the businesses; enabling them to track what’s important for their customers, what’s their behavior in terms of the type of services they get.”

According to Gervasio, BaseUp is an initial step to make daily transactions here in the country easier.

“The three of us had that common goal of improving how things are done here in the Philippines. In the U.S., your normal day‑to‑day is so convenient, making bank transactions is so easy, coming up with a business is so easy, just doing the everyday things,” he said.

While the company’s current product focuses on online booking, Gervasio said BaseUp aims to come up with products that can address small businesses’ pain points such as payment process, product promotion, and driving up sales and marketing.

Asked what motivated them to leave the U.S.—the proverbial land of milk and honey—to build a startup from the ground up in a third world country like the Philippines, Salazar simply quipped: “It’s more fun in the Philippines.”

But aside from helping purvey buzz cuts and french crops, while serving up custom designer coffee on the side, BaseUp has a larger mission.

“We wanna make products that will help entrepreneurs set up a business in a day,” Gervasio said. “We decided that one thing we could do a lot better here in the Philippines is customer service. There’s nothing that really delivers delightful experiences here. Our main point is we try to scale it down to the essentials and really study how we can deliver a good experience.”