By Krysten Brenlla
Making an appointment at your local beauty salon can feel like a drag, with many salons or barbershops taking appointments months in advance. As your New Year’s Eve party inches closer, your hair or nails may need that extra boost, and without an appointment, it may seem impossible to get them done at this time.
That’s where Glamo steps in – a beauty application that allows customers to schedule a stylist, at any time, for any service they need.
The best part? The stylist can come right to your home.
“Being from Jamaica and being around Jamaican parents, I was naturally born into entrepreneurship,” said Rishielle Giscombe, founder of Glamo [pictured above]. “When I moved to Florida, I always had an inclination to help people, so I started going to my friend’s houses to do their hair. That’s when Glamo was born.”
Giscombe launched her business, originally known as Rishelle’s Mobile Beauty Salon, in 2015, and went from 10 clients to 150 clients in two months.
To keep the momentum going, she hired her first employees – three stylists – all who helped her transform Rishielle’s Mobile Beauty Salon into a booming business for stylists and barbers across Florida.
Around that time, Giscombe noticed that Uber was transforming the market with its instantaneous pickup/drop off services. With the motivation to keep pushing her business to the next level, she realized that with her own website and mobile application, Rishelle’s Mobile Beauty Salon had the potential to transform the beauty industry.
“I instantly thought, ‘this is a game-changer’,” Giscombe said. “So I hired web designers that helped me build out this next phase of my business, and that’s when the magic happened.”
The web designers advised Giscombe to find a name that was shorter and catchier for the new website, which is where Glamo was born.
In 2018, Giscombe’s team launched the new brand and Glamo website/scheduling service. Directly on Glamo’s website, clients can login, select the service they’re looking for, and choose the stylist closest to them based on their price range. Then, clients can book the stylist online, and the stylist can come to their home in as little as 30 minutes.
“The core of Glamo’s business is on-demand styling,” Giscome continued. “When we display our technology, it’s to showcase that quick service – you don’t have to worry about going to the salon anymore – Glamo can help you with whatever you need, wherever you are.”
Since the launch of the scheduling service, Glamo’s business has boomed, with the application hosting more than 13,000 stylists from across the nation and world – all available to book.
For the future, Glamo hopes to become a global company, where stylists no longer have to depend on renting out their chairs in barbershops or salons for clients. Instead, Glamo hopes to be a trendsetter for stylists looking to build their own schedules.
“With Glamo, I want to change the structure of the typical salon business,” Giscombe continued. “As a stylist working with Glamo, or on the Glamo platform, you don’t have to buy your own chair, be restricted to overhead costs, or one booth in a beauty salon – with Glamo, you can be your own boss, and that’s what I love.”
Glamo is currently raising $1.2 million to build out its mobile application in January 2023, so consumers around the world can have access to Glamo stylists on-the-go. The company is also working on launching new services like marketplace shopping and on-demand delivery on specific beauty products, like hair extensions.
This year, Glamo was selected as one of 60 startups nationally for Google for Startup’s Black Founders Fund.
“With Glamo, I want to create a new economic and change the way beauty is for people,” Giscombe said. “Glamo is making a difference.”
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