Glo wasn't dreamed up in an office by people who've never stood behind a salon counter. It was built to run a real tanning salon, and it still does, every single day.
I own a tanning salon, and like most salon owners, I started out juggling a diary, a card machine, a stack of paper consultation forms and a spreadsheet of who had how many minutes left on their course. It worked, mostly. Until it didn't.
The Saturday problem
Every salon owner knows the feeling. The door keeps opening, the phone keeps ringing, someone wants to use up the last six minutes of a course bought in March, and nobody can find the skin test they signed last year. Every system we tried was built for hair and beauty in general. None of them really understood sunbeds: minutes, courses, skin types, bed times, the lot.
So I built my own. My background is 28 years in IT, much of it in regulated industries where records have to be right and systems can't just fall over. I brought that same thinking to the salon.
Tested where it matters
Every feature in Glo has been used on a real shop floor before it went anywhere near another salon. If something slowed the front desk down, it got changed. If a report didn't add up at the end of the day, it got fixed. That's a very different starting point from software designed around a demo.
Your data, kept properly
Client records in a salon are personal, and in a tanning salon they include skin and health information. Glo is hosted in Google Cloud data centres in Europe, built with UK GDPR in mind, and every member of staff only sees what their role needs. It's the kind of thing you never think about until you need it, so we thought about it first.
What's next
After years running it in our own salon, we're now bringing Glo to other salons across the UK. If you've ever thought your software was built for someone else's business, I'd love to show you what we've made.
Paul Humphrys, founder of Glo