Belle
Building a platform to help independent salons attract and retain loyal, digital-first clients in a highly competitive beauty market.
Belle was created within a venture incubator in partnership with L’Oréal, which operates over 4,000 hair and beauty salons across the UK. I led a cross-functional team through a lean design process to identify the unmet needs of salon operators, stylists and their clients. Salons struggled with time constraints and fragmented tools that offered little insight into client preferences, while clients prioritised ease of communication and confidence over price. Belle was designed as a curated discovery and booking experience that bridged these gaps and helped salons compete with fast-growing digital-first platforms like Treatwell.
Deliverables: User Research, Product Strategy, UX & UI Design, Brand Identity, Design System, Pitch Deck
Project Type: Zero-to-One, Mobile App, B2B, B2C, Marketplace, Pitch
Team: Product Design Lead (me), Business Analyst, Full-stack Developer
Business Goal
L’Oréal had ambitions to digitise and strengthen its salon and stylist network. Belle was conceived to increase bookings, unlock new revenue streams and improve client satisfaction by giving stylists a clearer understanding of each person’s preferences and expectations. To meet the incubator model, we needed to deliver an MVP and investor pitch within three months, positioning Belle as a standalone business with long-term growth potential.
User Goal
For customers, the goal was to build confidence in trying new looks and communicating a desired style with ease. Belle helped users express their chosen styles visually and connect with stylists matched to their preferences, increasing satisfaction and driving client retention. For salon owners, Belle offered a way to better match stylist skillsets to client expectations, reduce no-shows and personalise sessions using real customer data.
Design Process
With the need to move quickly, my focus was ensuring we designed an MVP that focused on the core challenges experienced by the salons and customers and served as a strong foundation for a venture-backable business. Here’s how I did it:
01. Initial Discovery
We visited over 30 salons across London, speaking directly with owners and stylists to understand their daily challenges. These qualitative insights were paired with UK-wide surveys (140 stylist respondents) and quantitative data from L’Oréal that helped validate our hypothesis that most tools in use were basic scheduling platforms, often only accessible at reception and largely seen as an annoyance. Stylists were under increasing pressure to reduce chair time whilst competing with the growing wave of on-demand platforms offering more personalised experiences.
02. Customer Research
Through one-on-one and group interviews with clients, we heard recurring stories of struggling to articulate their desired look, often relying on saved images from Google or Instagram, only to leave disappointed. Few considered whether a preferred style would match with their stylist’s skills or experience and 60% avoided trying new salons out of fear they would walk out unimpressed. We mapped out the typical client’s journey across discovery, booking, styling, payment and rebooking to uncover friction points causing an impersonal, poor experience.
03. Ideation & Strategy
We ran ideation sessions anchored around a single prompt: how might we improve communication between salon, stylist and client? For the MVP, our chosen direction was a mobile app aimed at late millennial and early Gen Z women, drawing on their existing social media behaviours like visual and influencer-led discovery. By letting users browse and book styles directly from photos, we could better match preferences with stylists skillsets and give salons richer customer information for communication during each appointment. Salon operations would initially run through a concierge model, allowing us to validate demand before building complex scheduling features.
04. Flows & Prototyping
With the MVP defined, I mapped key user flows and created low-fidelity wireframes. The onboarding flow centred on a visual “taste profile” that let users quickly express their style preferences. This data powered a Pinterest-style feed of suggested looks, tagged stylists with matching skills and gave salons a much better understanding of individual clients. Booking and payment were integrated into the discovery flow, enabling users to book at the peak of confidence and increasing leads for stylists. I created prototypes in Figma and conducted guerrilla-style testing with 35 women on Kensington High Street to quickly validate decisions and get feedback.
05. UI Design
My goal was to create an interface that felt enjoyable, sticky and familiar to our fashion-savvy demographic. The visual language and interaction patterns took cues from fashion media and the social platforms our target users engaged with daily. Given the rapid pace of the incubator process, design and development progressed in tandem. Instead of producing complete static flows, I focused on a live design system of reusable components, supported by example screens and reference wireframes.
06. Pitch & Handover
At the end of the three months, we had delivered a validated MVP, a prioritised product roadmap and a pitch deck designed to secure investment. Alongside leading product ideation, design and validation, I also named the brand and created its identity, a confident, elegant aesthetic that carried across the app, pitch materials and investor collateral. Our efforts resulted in a strong foundation that clearly communicated Belle’s value to both L’Oréal and potential investors.
Designing a multi-sided platform means navigating the motivations and emotions of very different users. Getting into salons to speak directly with stylists and their customers was vital to this project and it reinforced the value of understanding lived experience as part of the design process.
The three-month sprint successfully delivered its core objective: a validated concept with clear signs of product–market fit. Belle was presented to L’Oréal corporate stakeholders and an investor committee, where it received strong early feedback. While I wasn’t involved in further commercial discussions or the launch, the project was a great example of lean strategy, quick iteration and empathy-led design.
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