Vanitee, the online booking destination which helps you book beauty services in Singapore, has acquired beauty salon e-directory Mefitted to meet growing demand for its services. The startup turned one this May and aims to focus on improving its mobile features and translate the B2B web solutions that Mefitted provides to salons.
The co-founders of Vanitee and Mefitted met throughout 2015 to share their vision and ideas. In February 2016, Mefitted co-founder Joanne Teo started to seriously look into Vanitee’s acquisition offer and officially accepted to join the founding team in May 2016.
Douglas Gan, CEO & Co-founder of Vanitee, explaining the vision behind the acquisition told The Tech Portal,
Vanitee’s solution is currently catered only to individual artists, so the acquisition of mefitted comes at a time when we are beginning to serve the beauty salons. Mefitted has an extensive B2B solution that enables us to empower the Beauty Salons. And they have existing strong relationships with their brand partners. Hence the acquisition.
With over 1,700 beauty artists on the platform, Vanitee is Singapore’s largest beauty provider, without owning any beauty salons. It is a platform for beauty artists to build and maintain a credible reputation through online profiles that have real customer bookings with genuine reviews including post-service pictures and work portfolios.
The startup aims to build end-to-end system that processes payments-to-service-guarantee of beauty services rendered in a reliable and scalable way. Gan further said that while searching for potential partnerships, Mefitted’s founders’ way of running the business attracted them.
Mefitted.com is one of a handful of Singapore-based beauty technology start-ups that launched in 2015. The interactive e-directory lists more than 8,200 salons by location and service type, including 120 salon brands such as Spa Esprit Group, Jean Yip, Prep and Porcelain Face Spa to offer Mefitted members exclusive discounts and avenues to leave their reviews.
Having experienced the services of Vanitee’s individual beauty artists first hand, Joanne claims individual beauty professionals who want to make a name for themselves, be it freelance or in shops, offer a better quality service and have more passion in delivering excellence.
When asked, How do you plan to integrate both the platforms and expand the business?
Douglas replied,
Mefitted is very strong with their B2B solutions with salons. That’s an area that Vanitee is quite weak in right now. Mefitted’s know-how and B2B web tools with more than 120 branded salons will enable us to offer an all rounded solution to beauty salons. We will review the assets of Mefitted.com and VanityTrove.com and make a decision on how to merge them into Vanitee’s website at a later date. Vanitee killed our website 6 months back as 98% of our bookings came from our Vanitee mobile app. So, at this time, our focus is on improving our mobile features and translating the B2B web solutions that Mefitted has provided to salons onto Mobile.
