More people are becoming barbers than ever, and the trade is growing in influence, in earning power, and in how seriously it's taken. Technology has followed part of that. Booking got software, and clients and barbers connect through apps now. But one part of the industry never got any: the relationship between a barber and the shop they work from. Chair rentals, rent payments, and the agreements behind them still run on cash, peer to peer transfers, text messages, and memory. That relationship is the economic core of a barbershop. Most barbers rent a chair and most shop owners rent chairs out, and it runs on the least documented system in the building. Rent is due Friday and someone forgets. Someone pays half now and half later. There's an agreement, but it was a conversation. A barber leaves and nobody is quite sure what was owed. None of that is anyone's fault. Nobody built the tool.
What BOOTH does
For shop owners, BOOTH is a way to list your chairs, put a rental plan on each one, and collect rent on a schedule, with a dashboard that shows what's paid, what's overdue, and what's coming. For barbers, it's a way to find a shop with a chair open, agree to terms you can actually read, and pay rent the same way you'd pay anything else, with your agreements, payments, and rewards staying with you wherever you work. It isn't a new way to run a barbershop. It's the way most shops already run, written down.
Starting in Chicago
We're building this in Chicago first. It's where the first barber college opened, it has a long line of master barbers, and it has a lot of shops that rent chairs. It's also where we are, which means we can walk into the shops using BOOTH and watch what works and what doesn't. That's how we plan to build it, with barbers and owners in the room, one shop at a time, before we go wider. If the rent and the agreements live on BOOTH, other things become possible. A barber's history of paying on time becomes something they can show a new shop. A shop's occupancy becomes something an owner can show a lender. Open chairs across a city become something a barber can search. We're early, and today BOOTH is a way to rent a chair and collect the rent for it. The rest is what we think that makes possible.