A North Texas couple saw a need and filled it, making the story of ShearShare something good for more than one million licensed professionals.
Tye and Courtney Caldwell created the app ShearShare in 2017 and have watched it grow since.
“For three years, we kind of serve as a concierge service. We may have had a stylist who needed a place to work for the weekend in a certain location or city, but they had special needs for their clients. We just started cold calling and getting them to where they needed to be,” Courtney said.
It hosts 30,000 users across more than 850 cities in the United States and has helped self-employed stylists and salon owners stay in business during the pandemic.
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“People know us in the tech space as the “Hair-BNB” of beauty apps and currently the #1 salon and barbershop booth rental app in the nation,” Courtney said. “We are helping stylists and barbers, nail tech and aestheticians get back to work safely. This also means because we are helping them find space when and where they need it and the price they want to pay; we are also helping these small brick and mortars to stay open as well. 40% of space goes unused every day in our industry. We figured out we could fill that gap by providing this tech solution.”
For the couple, it’s about helping others, but inspiring those who may have an idea, but don’t know how to execute it. Tye, who recently earned his doctorate degree in barbering and cosmetology, says it is about diving right in.
“People have come up with great ideas from the smallest to the largest. Go for it. Execute on that idea. Reach out to people who can help you understand what you want to do. You have to be the optimist and give yourself the confidence to move forward,” Tye said.
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Courtney has become the 33rd Black woman in the nation to raise $1 million in venture funding. ShearShare was 1 out of 12 startups in the world selected for the Google Black Founders accelerator.
Investors in ShearShare include Mark Cuban, Jaylon Smith of the Dallas Cowboys and more in which they have raised more than $3.4 million in funding to date.
