LOS ANGELES — Explaining his new haircut, Ashton Kutcher was quoted in People as joking recently during a PaleyFest panel that “Jesus wanted [his look] back, so I gave it to him.”
If the actor thought less about a higher power and more about his bottom line, he probably booked his haircut on StyleSeat. That’s because Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s A-Grade Investments are part of a $775,000 round of funding for the Web site, a San Francisco-based online scheduling system likened to OpenTable for salons and spas. Others involved in the latest round of investment include Sophia Bush; Founders Fund, which is led by former PayPal and Facebook tech luminaries, and a long list of current investors, including Uber co-founder and chief executive officer Travis Kalanick and Google Inc. executive turned Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who participated in a $750,000 funding round in 2010.
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The glitzy roster of investors belies StyleSeat’s early fund-raising attempts two years ago. “Thirty percent of venture capitalists are bald — which may not exactly be true — and these guys are like, ‘The hair industry, what is this?’ We were like, ‘You are going to eat your words later,’” said StyleSeat ceo and co-founder Melody McCloskey. “Dan [Levine] the co-founder, and I put all of our savings into it, and then we went again to raise money and got the most exciting people — the people that built the biggest sites on the Internet — to look at our site. We had traction, and they saw just how valuable it was.”
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Despite the funding, StyleSeat could still probably use the money Kutcher paid for his haircut. It has yet to generate revenues because it’s free to spa and salon professionals, about 40,000 of which have set up Web sites on StyleSeat similar to work-oriented Facebook pages where clients can reserve appointments.
McCloskey expects hundreds of thousands of stylists to be active on StyleSeat by the end of next year and, well before that, she anticipates StyleSeat to begin generating revenues through brand tie-ins and by earning a portion of the price for bookings it delivers.
“As we start to grow the businesses of salons and spas, we get a cut of that, so our path to monetization is in the short term, and it is very clear,” said McCloskey.