Thousands of beauty artists in Indonesia are paying this startup to get more sales

In Indonesia, when it comes to dressing up for an occasion, there’s often no difference between a casual Sunday brunch with friends and a wedding banquet. From hair and makeup to nails and eyebrows, everything has to be on point. In fact, it’s not uncommon for Indonesian women to visit the hair salon or, in some cases, hire a beauty artist before a lunch date in town.

A make-up artist’s portfolio on HelloBeauty.

Dennish Tjandra is the CEO and founder of HelloBeauty, an Indonesia-based beauty services marketplace, and he knows just how high the demand for beauty artists is. A few years ago, his wife needed the services of a beauty artist, so she searched for one on Instagram. However, it turned out to be a horrible experience.

“My wife had to scroll through Instagram, look for beauty artists via hashtags, contact them one by one, and ask the same questions about price and availability over and over again,” Tjandra recalls. “It was just a big waste of time.”

This then sparked the idea for HelloBeauty, a platform that connects users and beauty artists.

Empowering beauty artists

Launched in 2017, HelloBeauty is the brainchild of Tjandra and his co-founder, Pradana Dyaksa.

For users, the platform works like any other marketplace. If you need beauty services, simply log on, scroll through a list of nearby beauty artists, and book an appointment straight from the website. Everything from availability to prices is listed, so you no longer have to call up individual beauty artists to find out how much a 30-minute hairstyling session would cost.

There are currently more than 6,000 beauty artists on the platform, including manicurists, hair stylists, and makeup artists, among others.

However, HelloBeauty’s selling point is for the beauty artists themselves. The platform offers a suite of customer relationship management tools to help them track their income, manage their clients, as well as schedule appointments.

“One of the key things we learned from beauty artists was that while most of them had the passion, they didn’t necessarily have any business background. They were struggling to manage and promote themselves,” Tjandra says. “So a big part of HelloBeauty is about providing the right tech support and giving them the right tools to grow their business.”

A free account allows beauty artists to be listed on HelloBeauty’s platform, though with limited access and no booking system. A premium membership, on the other hand, gives access to more benefits: an entire suite of business tools, collaboration with beauty brands, top listing on the search page, and promotion.

Subscription is the startup’s main source of revenue, though Tjandra wouldn’t reveal specifics.

So far, 30% of the beauty artists on the platform are on premium membership. Since its launch, the startup has recorded 15,000 transactions from its subscribers, which translates to about eight bookings per artist on average.

Tjandra clarified that each transaction might come with multiple clients. “Let’s say it is for a wedding, users will book [for multiple] family members or for all the bridesmaids,” he says. The number of subscribed beauty artists also grew by 4.5x in 2018.

A rough patch

A beautiful outlook