powerpoint deck

Handsome is the “best salon app for beauty and barber professionals.” Within three months after the app’s 2018 launch, 25 percent of the cosmetologists in New York City had created accounts. The sky-high adoption rates made the founders, April Dominguez and Nikki Dominguez, realize that they had started something with huge potential for growth.

April, the CEO, sees their business as being much larger than just creating an app or running a job listings service. For her, the mission of Handsome is to build a strong community and empower a ton of minority solopreneurs and business owners in the process. Nikki, a beauty industry veteran and the COO, sees the app’s potential to disrupt archaic business practices in a $60B industry. Together, the Dominguez sisters created Handsome to deliver three services for beauty professionals: 1) Find jobs, 2) Learn skills, 3) Receive career advice.

“We aren’t just building a product,” say the co-founders. “We are serving a group of people who represent ourselves. We are serving a community that’s overlooked and underestimated.” About 90 percent of hairstylists and cosmetologists are women. Sixty-six percent of barbers are Black or Latinx. And 30 percent of hairstylists are Black or Latinx.