Consumer & Local ServicesD-08Previous work

ChairFlow

A barbershop operating system designed around the walk-in queue and mobile money

Repository (private)

Timeline: 2026
Availability: Not publicly reachable
Repositories: 1
Role: Product positioning, design and prototype build
Summary: A worked-through product concept for barbershops, salons and braiding studios — marketing site, onboarding and the full in-shop interface — built to test a specific bet against the incumbents: flat pricing per location, no commission on the shop's own clients, and mobile-money deposits instead of card rails. It runs on demo data; nothing behind it is real yet.

Screens

marketing, onboarding and the product shell

Incumbents studied

the pricing research the positioning came from

What it is

Not a client build — a bet, worked out far enough to look at. The category is crowded with capable products, so the interesting question was not whether a booking app could be built but whether there was an unclaimed position in it. The prototype exists to make that position concrete: a marketing site that argues it, a three-step onboarding that prices it, and the in-shop interface it would have to deliver.

The three things the incumbents get complained about

Reading the reviews of seven established products in the category, the same grievances repeat, and all three are pricing decisions rather than feature gaps:

Per-staff fees. Charging per seat punishes the shop for hiring, and it generates the angriest reviews in the category. ChairFlow is priced flat per location.
Marketplace commissions. Taking a percentage of a “new” client the shop found through its own Instagram is the complaint that makes owners leave. The position here is that the shop’s clients stay the shop’s.
Card rails. Every incumbent assumes cards. In Ghana and across West Africa the natural instrument is mobile money — which matters twice over, because a deposit at booking is what protects against no-shows, and the subscription itself has to be collectable in the same way.

The queue is the primary object

Most booking products model appointments and treat walk-ins as an exception. In a barbershop the queue is the shop: people arrive, wait, and are seen in an order everyone in the room can see. So the queue is first-class here — self-join by QR code, live wait estimates, a board that can go on the wall — and a booking is a reservation inside the queue rather than a separate system running alongside it.

Checkout follows the same logic. Services, retail and tip land on one ticket, split across payment methods if needed, with the rebook prompt on the paid screen while the client is still in the chair.

What is actually built

The interface, end to end, running on a mock data store. There is no backend, no payment integration and no subscriber — the prices in the onboarding flow are a proposal, not something anyone has been charged. It is here as design and positioning work that reached a testable state and stopped, not as a product.