It’s strange to think how different the world has become over the last year – lockdowns, face masks and social restrictions (to name a few) have all contributed to a new reality which we find ourselves in – and it was a discussion about this new reality and how different things are going to be – which sparked the idea of Booka Trim. We’ve seen in society, everyday life and throughout history that change often results in a vacuum, which in turn leads to opportunity.

I’m sure everyone else noticed that once restrictions during the first lockdown eased, everything became appointment / queue based – which made complete sense. The interesting and perhaps slightly inevitable part of this was how these new measures were handled in a digital capacity – QR codes, booking appointments / slots, online tickets reservations, virtual queues etc all became the norm very quickly. It was no surprise seeing such a rapid adoption of these digital products into our everyday life.

Being guys that work in tech, and therefore having a passion for tech – we started to think about how good a barber specific booking system would be. We’re big believers in technology solving problems – and this seemed like an obvious solution to a common problem that we were bound to face. At this point we started to research and investigate whether there was a booking product out there which solved this problem – and to our surprise there were loads.

Booka Trim is a black owned business and we go to black barber shops. We had never used Booksy, or Treatwell, or any other booking system to book a trim with our barber – and this seemed strange. The majority of platforms out there are established, big global companies which provide bookings for thousands of businesses and their customers. So this made us want answers to the following questions:

◘ Why are black barber shops under represented on booking platforms?
◘ Which booking platform will black barber shops use?
◘ Will the platform be secure and have a good user experience?
◘ Could we solve these issues by launching our own booking platform?

We were unable to find answers to a lot of our questions – which made us want to build our own product. The need for our product increased after the government released figures showing that BAME groups are more likely to contract COVID. This created an added urgency for us to release a workable product which had been designed, developed, tested and launched as soon as physically possible.

Fast forward to now, having processed over 130 bookings – Booka Trim has started to make some nice moves. We’ve obtained a load of useful findings which will start to shape the next iterations of our product.

We’ll cover it’s progress so far in another blog piece..