Strando
A booking and business platform connecting clients directly with individual hair professionals, built around the professional rather than the shop they happen to work in.
Overview
Strando is a two-sided marketplace connecting clients directly with individual hair professionals.
Rather than making the salon the primary entity, the platform is structured around the professional: their work, services, pricing, availability, clients and reputation. It combines marketplace discovery, scheduling, payments, subscriptions and business operations across mobile and web.
The problem
Appointment platforms almost always model the relationship around a shop. That is a poor fit for the way a large part of this industry actually works.
Independent professionals rent chairs, move between shops, work from more than one location and carry their own customer base with them. When the platform models the shop, everything they have built is attached to a business they may leave next month.
Strando treats the individual professional as the durable entity instead. Their profile, portfolio, services, pricing, availability, client relationships and booking history stay with them.
The product
The client-facing product covers discovery through to a completed, paid appointment: finding nearby professionals, viewing portfolios and prices, seeing genuine availability, booking, paying, and managing or rescheduling afterwards.
The professional-facing product is a business-management tool rather than a public profile page: services, durations, pricing, working hours, blocked time, bookings, clients, cancellation policy, earnings and subscription.
A third surface handles platform administration — marketplace oversight, accounts and support.
Key capabilities
Marketplace discovery
Location-based search for nearby professionals, with portfolios, services, pricing and real availability visible before any account is required.
Booking engine
Resolves services, durations, working hours, blocked periods and existing bookings into the slots that are genuinely available, then holds that state through payment.
Payments
Client payment through Stripe, with Apple Pay and Google Pay where the platform supports them, tied to the lifecycle of the booking rather than sitting beside it.
Subscriptions
Recurring subscription for professionals, with entitlement reconciled against the account rather than the device the purchase happened on.
Professional operations
Onboarding, profile and portfolio, service and price management, availability, client records, appointment history and earnings visibility.
Business policies
Cancellation, refund, rescheduling and notice-period rules vary between professionals, so policy is modelled as data and shown to the client before they commit.
Authentication and roles
Email registration with one-time-code verification, plus Google and Apple sign-in. The account role is chosen once at creation rather than asked for repeatedly at sign-in.
Notifications and calendar
Booking confirmations, changes and reminders, with calendar integration so an appointment exists where the person already looks for it.
Engineering
The booking is only one transaction. The harder engineering problem is holding availability, payment, policy, notifications and two people’s expectations in a consistent state.
The failure modes are the design brief: two clients holding the same slot, a payment that exists without a valid booking, a cancellation that never produced the right refund state, availability that is stale by the time somebody taps it, and a duplicate request created by an impatient second tap. Each of those is handled explicitly rather than left to chance.
Subscription entitlement is reconciled across purchase channels so it follows the professional’s account. A subscription bought on one device that does not recognise the same person on another is a support ticket, not a feature.
The client application, the professional application and the administration surface share central business logic rather than reimplementing the same rules three times and drifting apart.
Product experience
Guests browse before signing up. Requiring an account to look at a portfolio loses the people who were only ever going to convert after seeing the work.
Availability shown to a client is availability that can actually be booked. A calendar that displays slots which then fail at checkout costs more trust than an emptier calendar that is honest.
Because policies differ between professionals, the relevant cancellation and refund terms are surfaced at the point of booking rather than buried in an account setting.
Outcome
- Strando is live at strando.co, with client and professional experiences across mobile and web.
- A professional’s services, availability, clients and history remain attached to them rather than to a premises, which is the point of the product.
Our role
- Product strategy
- UX and interface design
- Mobile application development
- Web application development
- Backend and marketplace architecture
- Booking and scheduling infrastructure
- Payments and subscription architecture
- Authentication and account roles
- Notifications
- Production delivery
Have a comparable requirement?
Send the brief or the procurement reference. We will tell you whether this is work we can do well.