Studios Chic is an exciting pre-launch online platform that offers a diverse range of beauty-related services. It serves as a hub for professional beauticians worldwide to share their expertise through live and on-demand instructional content. Additionally, it features a vibrant artist marketplace where professionals can connect with clients. Artists have the flexibility to create accounts, offer on-demand courses, host live streams, schedule virtual consultations, and manage transactions seamlessly. On the other hand, consumers can explore a wealth of beauty professionals, discover their unique styles, access valuable tips, and find recommendations for top-quality products.

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The Challenge

In the United States, there are approximately 170,000 beauty-related stores, each employing an average of four beauticians who work either as full-time employees or independent contractors. However, managing these small businesses and attracting clients can be a daunting task, especially when trying to juggle the operational side of the business. Adding to the challenge, many beauticians are facing competition from social media influencers who lack professional training. These professionals often find themselves managing multiple social media accounts and dedicating a significant amount of their free time to creating and sharing content, as well as responding to comments.

Our goal was to streamline the marketing, outreach, and engagement process for trained beauticians, offering them a unified platform to connect with clients and providing an additional avenue to monetize their skills. The question we faced was: How could we entice users to transition away from platforms like YouTube and Instagram?

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The Solution

Our mission was to create an all-encompassing platform tailored for beauty professionals, providing them with the essential tools to market themselves, engage with potential clients, offer video consultations, schedule and charge for services, and promote their personal brands. We aimed to build a comprehensive marketplace that also enabled professionals to sell classes and products. Our journey began with a focus on video distribution, Masterclasses, and Tutorials, which later expanded to include Artist profiles and user chat functionality.

To bring this vision to life, I took charge of architecting the underlying platform, leveraging Amazon Cloudfront for efficient content distribution, Media Convert for video encoding, and Media Package for preparing stream-ready fragmented video files and playlists. To protect content integrity and ensure maximum accessibility, we opted for watermarking instead of DRM (Digital Rights Management).

On the front-end, we employed ReactJS and harnessed various components of AWS Amplify for user authentication and management, as well as AppSync to facilitate access to underlying data via GraphQL. To provide a seamless viewing experience, we utilized video.js on the client-side. We also integrated a range of social and timeline-based selling features that allowed artists to promote and link to products featured in their content. This holistic approach aimed to empower beauty professionals while offering an engaging platform for users to discover and connect with them.

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In addition to the platform's core functionalities, I implemented a chat function right on the site that enables users to engage in real-time conversations with artists, powered by WebRTC technology. To ensure a smooth and cost-effective deployment process, we chose an approach that directly linked users to each other, establishing direct communication channels between their web browsers.

While this approach provided significant cost savings and helped kickstart the deployment, it had some trade-offs. One limitation was the inability to monitor and enhance the user experience by routing messages through our servers. However, we did prioritize end-to-end encryption for messages, which significantly increased user trust and security. Our decision aimed to strike a balance between cost-efficiency and ensuring a secure and private communication environment for our users.

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Artists had the autonomy to take charge of their profiles upon signing up and receiving authorization from our dedicated editorial team. Once recognized as artists within our platform, they received special prominence in our Artist search screens. They enjoyed the privilege of curating their artist feed, managing essential business information such as availability and service listings for bookings, and creating and uploading tutorials and classes available for purchase.

Behind the scenes, our platform seamlessly facilitated these interactions through a REST API layer. This API was built on a foundation of Java microservices, harnessing the power of AWS Gateway and Fargate to ensure reliability, scalability, and optimal performance for both artists and users alike.

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Challenges

The Chic project faced its most significant challenge in the form of its ambitious scope, a necessity to compete with established streaming giants like Youtube or Tiktok. We recognized the need to create a comprehensive ecosystem that would attract both Artists and users, providing a broader context for engagement.

Like many bootstrapped startups, we had to approach this challenge with creativity, making the most of our limited funds. While it's true that achieving all our desired features and scale would require expanded funding, our overarching mission of providing affordable and time-saving tools to small business professionals across the United States remains a noble and worthy endeavor. It's this mission that will empower Chic to not only survive but thrive in the market.

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Tools

• IntelliJ
• XCode
• Visual Studio Code
• Java/Spring
• Javascript/ReactJS (w/ Redux)
• AWS (various)
• REST
• Figma/Zeplin
• AWS Amplify
• AWS Media Services
• Video.js

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