Month-old StayGlad bags funding to provide doorstep beauty services in just 20 minutes

Prateek Jain’s wife couldn’t find someone trusted to help her drape on a sari for family functions, nor could she find a makeup expert for special occasions. He dug deeper into the problem and found a significant gap in the market. He quickly built Stayglad, a site for booking beauty services, as an answer to problems faced by many like his wife.

“We are changing the way customers access beauty and ‘get ready’ services at short notice and paving the way for beauty professionals to maximize their skills with no overhead costs,” says Jain.

The startup was launched just last month and today Jain revealed that it already raised angel funding from a group of investors including Tracxn Labs and Delhivery founder Sahil Barua.

Stayglad enables customers to get beauty, styling, and makeup services at the doorstep. The startup claims to have verified, well-trained, and certified beauty service professionals. The users can choose from services like threading, waxing, bleach, facial, and so on. They can select a particular look or the professional will choose the sari, do up a hairstyle, and apply makeup according skin tone and occasion.

Growing category

“The biggest advantage of an on-demand beauty services marketplace model is that the business leverages technology to bypass the overhead of running a brick and mortar storefront, and reaches out to a much wider audience in comparison to a salon whose reach is limited to its geography,” says Barua.

Stayglad, which is currently offering beauty services only in Bangalore, expects to expand to other cities and launch an app with funding. It also intends to bring down the turnaround for scheduling appointments to just 20 minutes.

The company was founded by alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT-K) – Prateek Jain, Shashank Gupta, and Kavish Desai.

Beauty as a category has a fairly sizable wallet share among households in India. According to an IBM report, the hair and beauty industry is expected to see a per capita annual spend of US$6.20 by 2015. The number of salons is growing at 35 percent while cosmetic treatments are growing at 5 percent year-on-year.

In India, online retail for beauty products has several venture capital-backed players like Purplle and Nykaa while the on-demand beauty service space is catching up.