Beauty-booking platform GoWabi looks to beat the odds as rivals fall away

With so many options in the market, consumers need to take some time and switch between multiple Google tabs as they search for the perfect beauty or wellness treatment at the right price point. Meanwhile, spas, salons, and other service providers struggle to attract new clients.

Many startups around Southeast Asia have entertained hopes of uniting the disjointed wellness industry under a single, tech-enabled platform.

Fave, which operates in most of the region, calls itself a “next-gen digital merchant aggregator,” as it helps restaurants, salons, and hotels offer their services through its app and website. VanityTrove, a Singapore-based beauty box company, pivoted in 2014 to become an online booking destination and review aggregator for local spa and salon services. A similar booking service can be found in Traveloka’s Xperience category, which was rolled out in June this year.

Most of these services offer a variation of the same core features: online bookings, consolidated payments, and user-generated reviews. But competition in Southeast Asia is cutthroat because the space is so crowded, and many startups – even those that have received millions in funding – have shuttered their doors and exited the market.

Given these conditions, can a relatively new player like Bangkok-headquartered GoWabi, which was founded in 2016 and has received relatively little funding, defy the odds?

GoWabi founders (L to R) Wipawee Wongsirisak, Samir Cherro, and Vadim Eremeev / Photo credit: handout

GoWabi, whose name was partly derived from the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi, has a twofold purpose. It’s enabling salons, spas, and other beauty and wellness merchants to land more clients by bringing offline booking processes online. It’s also helping customers find the services they need by collating information on thousands of vendors across Thailand under one platform.

The startup doesn’t charge providers and end-users a fee for its services. Vendors, however, need to be reviewed and verified manually by GoWabi. Once the startup has completed the necessary checks – a process that can sometimes involve calling past customers to ask about their experiences – the merchant will be added to its platform. Clients can review the listed services, just like how they can review products or sellers on an ecommerce platform.

To encourage users to book through its platform, GoWabi offers cashback rewards and exclusive price cuts for appointments during off-peak hours. “For example, salons may offer a 30% discount during lunch hours, but at peak hours the service is full price,” explains Samir Cherro, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, tells Tech in Asia.

While the discounts are provided by the salons, they’re developed in conjunction with GoWabi, which gives them data about salon demand and capacity. Such information is used to put together deals that customers will actually want, and these, in turn, help the startup entice and retain users.

GoWabi earns revenue through paid merchant ads and commissions on successful bookings, and it never charges companies that haven’t received any reservations via its platform in over a month. “If they don’t sell anything, they don’t lose anything,” observes Cherro. “This model helps ensure that we are invested in their success.”

Next target: Indonesia

In its native Thailand, GoWabi currently supports over 1,000 spas, salons, and shops, including internationally recognized names like celebrated US brand Benefit Cosmetics, French drugstore staple Yves Rocher, and waxing boutique Strip.

GoWabi seeks to get the same numbers in Bali, where it began operations two months ago and has partnered with 100 merchants so far. The startup, however, is setting its sights beyond the Indonesian resort town. “We’re looking at all of Indonesia. We have plans to begin operating in Jakarta within the next few months,” Cherro shares.

He notes that GoWabi has grown five times over since last year, adding that its app has been downloaded over 100,000 times to date and a few thousand bookings are made per day. “Our quarter-to-quarter growth rate is around 40%, and I’m confident we can continue this into next year. It may not be an aggressive 40%, but it will still be double digits month-on-month,” he explains.

Focus on merchants

Forced to generate revenue