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MOVERS & SHAKERS


Daniel Lizio-Katzen & Josh McCarter The COO and CEO of GramercyOne talk about their recent $15.25m VC investment round and future plans


SpaBooker, web-based spa management software was originally launched by SpaFinder and then spun off into a separate company – GramercyOne – in 2010


Daniel Lizio-Katzen, COO


What’s your background? I joined SpaFinder as head of online marketing and technology in 2006, when the company had created an interesting opportunity


for itself through the popularity of its gift certifi cate programme. When customers purchased gift certifi -


cates, recipients would go to spafi nder.com to fi nd a spa at which to redeem them. As sales grew, so did this inbound traffi c and here is where the opportunity lay; once they found a spa, they had no way of schedul- ing appointments online. We realised there was an opportunity to connect the ‘last mile’ and enable them to book directly through spafi nder.com without calling the spa.


How did you tackle this opportunity? We researched the spa software market to fi nd partners but quickly realised existing systems wouldn’t integrate with spafi nder. com, so we decided to build a simple sched- uling tool to allow our spa partners to load available time slots. We alpha tested this,


42 spa business handbook 2012 GramercyOne's Lizio-Katzen (left) and McCarter (right)


but found spas hated maintaining one cal- endar, let alone two or more, so they didn’t keep their available time slots up to date. At this point we decided the best path


was to build our scheduling software into a more comprehensive cloud-based product and to add point-of-sale (POS), reporting, marketing, and CRM functionality, so it could be used as a standalone spa man- agement system and this is the product we launched as SpaBooker at ISPA in 2007. To our pleasant surprise, we signed up


three times the number of spas in 2008 as we’d projected and as the economy went into recession we actually saw our sign-ups accelerate – largely due to the fact that as


an internet-based, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), system, spas didn’t have to make a large investment up-front to get started.


What happened next? In 2009, when the world’s economy was upside down, we noticed SpaBooker was starting to be purchased by businesses in the fitness, sport, medical and other scheduling-based industries. As this trend accelerated, the board of SpaFinder decided there was wider opportunity for the system in other markets and that it made sense to spin the SpaBooker division out of SpaFinder and into a new standalone company to accelerate this growth.


www.spahandbook.com


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