Great salons are invisible online. We fix that.
SalonWins is built by Arcate Labs, a small studio with more than a decade on the digital and search side of the salon industry. We built the platform we spent ten years wishing existed.
We didn’t set out to build websites. We set out to rank salons.
Then the same thing kept happening, salon after salon. This is how SalonWins actually got built.
SalonWins didn’t start as a website company. We did SEO for salons: local rankings, the technical plumbing that decides whether you show up for “balayage near me” or sit on page two. And almost every salon we took on had the same thing waiting under the hood: a website quietly working against them. Foundationally broken SEO. Nothing built to convert. So out of date that half the team wasn’t even on it. Dated service descriptions, no reviews, no real photos. The work behind the chair was excellent. Everything outside the door was broken.
You can’t rank a broken site. So before we could do the SEO we were hired for, we’d spend hours fixing the website first: untangling someone’s WordPress, migrating Wix to WordPress, Squarespace to Wix, just to get a foundation worth ranking. By then the hours had run up. Or we were three weeks deep in back-and-forth with the salon’s “website guy.” Or refereeing between our SEO work and a developer who’d never met us. Every campaign we wanted to grow stalled on the same bottleneck: the website underneath it.
That’s what got us into this. We spent months talking to salon owners, not about SEO but about their websites. What actually drove them up the wall. If you own a salon, you already know this list by heart. So do we.
No more dated WordPress host with a stack of outdated plugins, a security hole, and an admin only one person on the team knows how to open. No more agency pulling two thousand a month while you sit outside the top ten, billing you by the hour for every change, and after five rounds of fixes it’s still not right. It isn’t fast. It isn’t easy. It never was.
Salon owners want a site that’s good-looking, easy to run, and something they’re proud to send. So we gave them that, and poured the hard parts into the foundation before anyone sees the site. Speed. Mobile. Conversion. On-page SEO. The AI and answer-engine work. Not toggles you flip on later. The concrete underneath, set on the first render.
We were almost ready to launch when AI stopped being a someday. It cut our build time and opened a door we hadn’t planned on: a built-for-you AI we call Claire. We fed her everything about each salon (the voice, the services, the stylist profiles, the SEO, every word on the site, even the competition) and wove her into the spine of the product. She’s how the platform writes for you, and the instrument our team works with behind the scenes. We’re still threading her deeper, week by week.
“You started this to build something of your own. Most days it can feel like the business owns you, and the clients who’d love you can’t even find you. We built SalonWins so that stops being true.”
Six features. One platform. Built only for salons.
Not a general website builder with a salon template bolted on. Every field, every page type, every default is designed around how a real salon works. Not a real-estate template with a haircut.
01 · Front end
01 · Front end
A site worth showing off.
Beautiful, lightning-fast, and mobile-perfect. Core Web Vitals pass out of the box. Real pages (services, team, gallery) designed for salons, not templates. Your salon looks as good online as it does in person.
02 · Studio
02 · Studio
The back office you can actually run.
Edit services, team, hours, and pricing in minutes. No page builder, no developer, no support ticket. The part agencies never hand over. Yours from day one.
03 · Done-for-you SEO
03 · Done-for-you SEO
A real team, not a dashboard.
Local rank, Map Pack, AI-model visibility, content pages: our team does the work. Monthly reporting, plain results. The difference between a retainer that does nothing and a team that actually ships.
04 · Claire
04 · Claire
Your salon’s AI writer.
Your salon’s AI. Writes service pages in your voice, drafts a reply to every review, and surfaces what ChatGPT and Google are saying about you, with real numbers, not vague advice.
05 · Brand DNA
05 · Brand DNA
Your look and voice, captured once.
Extracted during onboarding and applied everywhere: the site design, the copy, and every word Claire writes. The thread that makes it feel like one salon across every surface.
06 · Booking
06 · Booking
Persistent, one-tap booking.
Book button above the fold on every page. Pulls from your existing system (Vagaro, Boulevard, Square, GlossGenius, Acuity) or runs ours. Operating-model aware: walk-in, appointment, or hybrid routes correctly, every time.
Four commitments. We don’t negotiate these.
A small studio that builds practical tools for service businesses.
Arcate Labs is a small studio founded by Nick Manderfield. We build practical tools for service businesses: the kind of software the people doing the actual work wish existed. SalonWins is the one we’d spent a decade wishing for.
It’s built from those hundreds of conversations, not a template, not a guess. Every feature maps to a problem we heard, in real salons, over real years. That’s the origin. That’s the receipt.