Building a Marketplace for Beauty Freelancers

About the Project

The co-founders of Wowers are a couple with over 15 years of experience in building a chain of beauty salons. They had a brave futuristic vision of a beauty startup that needed a reliable technology partner to bring their ideas to life. The main goal of their SaaS solution was to change the beauty industry in Poland by allowing beauty freelancers to easily find clients and earn money without salons and large investments in marketing or rent.

Business Need: Create an App for Beauty Millennials and Freelancers

VSTORM was tasked with defining a solution that would appeal to generations “Y” and “Z” by presenting the value of the SaaS solution through a unique mobile experience. The main aim of the product was to create a community of beauty freelancers and allow them to earn money easily with no additional costs on marketing or rent so that they can be their own boss.

Approach: Orientation at the Mobile-First Users to Create a Better Experience

To fully understand the needs of the client, VSTORM scheduled a product workshop to crystallize the vision for the app, meet our client’s expectations, and give our recommendations.

VSTORM started working on the project by creating a UX prototype and wireframes for the mobile app. The team worked collaboratively with Wowers using an agile scrum framework. VSTORM also undertook the consulting aspect while developing a strategy and prioritized roadmap for MVP.

As millennials between 18–32 years are the Wowers’ target audience, we decided to make an outstanding design and great user experience with personalized illustrations. The analysis also showed that over 65% of users would use the platform on their mobile devices, which is why the team started working on “mobile-first” design and paid exceptional attention to mobile development to arrange the best user experience.

VSTORM then created a structure that would make the app scalable and wrote the code according to the best practices and standards. The team chose Java to create the native mobile app for Android and tested it on over 10 different Android devices.

Also, it was decided to integrate Leaflet.js instead of Google Maps, following the path of such services as Facebook, Pinterest, Github, and Foursquare. During the entire development process, VSTORM made sure to constantly undertake code reviews and thoroughly test the Wowers app, which allowed the team to avoid bugs and build a trouble-free MVP.