Small is Beautiful

We're proud to be a small, home-based company, as we believe that we can offer you greater innovation and better value than many larger companies:

Design Without Compromise

The Salon Alchemy code is designed by one person, a Guru-level Java developer with over 16 years experience of working in IT. Having one person develop and maintain the system avoids the problems inherent with "too many cooks" working on IT systems:

• The design is the unified vision of one person rather than the disagreements and compromises of a committee.
• You talk direct to the person who designed the system, rather than being fobbed off by someone in a call centre who is reading from a script.
• No need for the huge volume of paperwork that accompanies many large IT projects.
• We know every aspect of the system inside out, rather than only having specialist knowledge in one area of the system.
• We don't waste time in meetings discussing what to do. We just do it.
• If we have a cool idea, we can "run" with it straight away, rather than having to get approval from a manager.
• We don't have to waste time diagnosing problems caused by someone else changing something and not telling us.
• We can get a new version of Salon Alchemy uploaded, built and deployed to our server in seconds. No complex overblown build process taking several minutes if not hours. No faffing around filling in forms and then waiting for someone else to mess up deploying the code to the server because the form wasn't filled in properly.

Low Overheads

• No office overheads. We work from home, or anywhere else we can use a laptop. So you're not having to pay out for the rent, maintenance and upkeep of an office.
• No bloated management structure. Why pay for superfluous layers of management when you can deal with us direct.
• Our system is built using Open Source software. So we don't have to pay any software licensing costs.

Efficient Working

• Salon Alchemy empowers you to take control. Rather than having to wait and pay someone else to update your treatment menus and price lists on your web site, you can log on to Salon Alchemy immediately and do it yourself via our powerful, user friendly interface.
• Salon Alchemy makes it quicker for us to design your web site. Listen very carefully, we shall code this only once! Our modular design means that we only have to create common aspects of your web site (e.g. header, footer and navigation) in one place. This makes your web site much quicker and easier to build and maintain. We also have access to a growing number of "generic components" which we can easily re-use across multiple websites (e.g. testimonials, contact form, etc), but which of course can be customised to your exact requirements.
• One system to do it all! Our vision was to come up with a single system that would be able to run salon management accounts and websites for multiple salon clients (each with their own database instance unique to them), yet be flexible enough to cater for all requirements - from home-based or mobile therapists working on their own to chains of salons. The Salon Alchemy system as it stands is already meeting many of our design criteria and requirements and can only improve over the coming months to become even more powerful and flexible.