Case Study

Balkan Barbershop — Live Client Site & Booking Platform

Balkan Barbershop · Barbershop website

Live

Portrait-driven editorial site fronting a full booking platform — bookings, payments, ratings, an admin AI assistant.

Overview

Project framing

A neighborhood barbershop needed an online identity that matched the room — brown/gold, editorial, neighborhood-rooted — plus a real booking system, ratings, reschedules, payments, and customer comms. Not a brochure; the operating layer.

Problem

Most barbershop websites fail on operations, not branding. The owner needed bookings, payments, ratings, reminders, and a way to query the business in English — built so the shop could run on it day one and the operator wouldn't need a developer to ask 'how many bookings this month?'

Role

Designer, engineer, deployer. Single-shop SaaS, four-month build.

Why now

Booking platforms exist (Booksy, Square) but they take a cut, lock the brand into their template, and surface customer data only on their dashboard. For a shop that wanted full brand control and full data ownership, the build-your-own path is cheaper at month 12 than month 1.

Topline

Constraints

A single-shop product — designed for a low operating burden and a safe update path.
Regulatory window on US SMS (A2P registration) — the integration shipped switchable and safely off by default.

Outcomes

Clients book and pay online, barbers see their schedules and ratings, and the owner runs the whole day from one admin view — instead of fielding calls and juggling paper.
The owner can ask business questions in plain English rather than pulling reports by hand.
Designed, built, and deployed end to end over a four-month engagement, and live in production for the shop.

Architecture

Step 1

Browse + select

The customer picks their services and their barber, with the available times shown as they choose.

Step 2

Sign in

Google sign-in or email and password, with sessions handled securely.

Step 3

Book and pay

The booking and its payment are committed together, so a half-finished booking can never exist.

Step 4

Remind

Upcoming bookings trigger an automatic reminder. Text messaging is built and switchable, held back pending US registration.

Step 5

Serve + rate

The barber sees their schedule; afterwards the customer is asked to rate the visit, and it attaches to that booking.

Step 6

Operate

The owner asks business questions in plain English — 'revenue by barber this month?' — answered only from what the assistant is allowed to see.

Key Decisions

Build the booking core before the brand polish

Spend two months on bookings, payments, ratings, reminders before touching the editorial design system.

A beautiful site for a broken booking flow is worse than an ugly site that works. Operators care about uptime; customers care that the booking went through.

The site looked plain for two months. The booking flow worked from week three.

Struggles

Text-message reminders. I went back and forth between providers for five days: the cheaper option cannot show a business name on US numbers, and the one that can costs more and requires a registration process of its own.

Honest framing — I did not solve it. I stopped pretending it could ship inside the current regulatory window, made the integration switchable so it can be turned on the day registration clears, and let email and in-app notifications carry the work in the meantime.

Learnings

Operators care about the boring parts. The flashy features are for portfolio screenshots.

Killing a feature on day four is a leadership skill, not a failure.