OREANDA-NEWS. hub:raum, the Deutsche Telekom incubator, is now supporting the Salonmeister team. The startup was founded in spring 2012 by Phillipp Rechberg, Louis Pfitzner and Nils Griess-Nega. The online booking platform for hair appointments went live last fall and has already proved successful in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich.

The idea behind the platform is to make it easy to find the right hairdresser and book appointments. With Salonmeister, customers are no longer tied to shop opening times when they make their bookings. When they enter a town or postcode in the system, it displays a list of establishments in the neighborhood. Detailed profiles with photos provide information about concept, team, services and prices. Ratings given by other customers round off the picture and help customers make the right decision.

Connected hair salons can get an up-to-date view of free capacities at any time on the electronic calendar. The working day becomes more efficient as a result of fewer phone calls, and winning new customers as a result of recommendations is a key success factor.

Salonmeister will soon be available in other big German cities and is also set to expand its offer with beauty and cosmetic services.

"In Salonmeister we have found a great team and a highly promising concept. The main point that convinced us was that the platform offers advantages for end-customers as well as retailers. Since Salonmeister's success largely depends on whether it manages to develop the mass market, we at Deutsche Telekom can provide crucial support - for example with access to our customers. Numerous synergies are also conceivable in SME sales, an area in which the team plans to position itself as a platform for service providers in the mid- to long-term," explains Peter Borchers, who heads hub:raum operations.

Along with hub:raum, Oliver Pabst, Christophe Maire and Tim Mьller were others who recognized the potential behind the idea and have chosen to support the young team as investors.

hub:raum was launched in Berlin in mid-2012 to support startups which have new ideas for telecommunications services, Internet services and digital media. The incubator provides a pool of experts, the huge Deutsche Telekom network, workspace and seed financing of up to EUR 300,000. Program plans currently call for a total of ten to 15 startups to be supported per year, and companies may enter the program at any time. So far, support is being provided for Blinkist and stylemarks.