Vive — unlimited blowouts at the best salons
This morning I saw an article for a new company, Vive. After looking at the pricing page, cities they are serving, and their Instagram, I knew exactly what this company is striving to become.
When breaking into the fashion space, you need to have an Instagram account already active, crafting your message — making sure it is in “on brand”. I recall when our former clients, Cobbler Concierge, (which we did the Front End work on) had their launch, they must have already had several dozen Instagram posts.
Vive is currently serving 3 markets: NYC (157 locations), Hamptons (7 locations) , and Chicago (67 locations). NYC is their home, so it’s always good to launch there. Chicago is also a large market, boasting itself as the 3rd most populated city after NYC and LA. Lastly, Hamptons needs to be checked off if you’re in the luxury space. I’m sure it’s not going to be a real earner until the summer months come around.
Techcrunch writes that Vive is a Classpass for Salons. We can dive into what Classpass is really doing in another post, but Vive is a little different than Classpass; not just the part that it doesn’t deal with gyms.
Vive currently handles a few things for Salons
The first is discovery. New York City has hundreds of Salons and the only way of discovering them is on Yelp. However, if you open up the Vive app, you’ll see all the Salons in your area that offer blowouts. No need to shop around for the best price, because they all costs the same if they are part of Vive. The sell to salons is that once Vive delivers a new lead, they might convert that customer to a recurring client — and not just for blowouts.
Second it is competing on price with Drybar, the biggest player in the blowout space. Although Drybar has over a dozen locations in NYC alone and ~60 around the US.
Vive can offer $30, 33% cheaper than Drybar, blowouts. This seems like an introductory price and is bound to go up, just like Classpass did.
Where it is heading?
Vive started out offering blowouts because of it’s lower price point (~$30), higher frequency than haircuts, and popularity.
Because they will curate an audience of women, with disposable income that like treating themselves, they can roll out other salon services and products. Buying of products can occur in the app, since the salons which Vive partners with are not owned by Vive, and hence cannot control what gets put to be sold on the shelves.
Although Drybar vows not to offer services other than blowouts, they sell products which center themselves around hair.
Possible flaws
High Switching Costs
If the attempt is to get women to switch salons, those attempts might be futile. Women are extremely loyal to their stylist. I’ve known women that would follow their stylist if they moved out of state. Women value consistency of quality over price saving.
Maintaining quality control
Because Vive doesn’t own the salons which it services, it is hard to maintain a standard level of service. Consistency of service is something that lacks with a lot of companies that “rent” their works. For example, both Uber and Lyft have had some terrible incident occur with their drivers.
All in all, Vive is an interesting product which can acquire a lot of women in metropolitan areas with their discounted blowouts and can upsell them to other beauty services and white label products. They just need to make sure to they somehow maintain consistent quality of their “contractors” and make sure a few bad apples don’t tarnish their name.
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