Company: Tuft Global
Founder: Chloe Smith
Website: https://tuftapp.com/
About Tuft Global
Tuft began in 2019 when our founder Chloe watched her dad fail to book a groomer. She told him he was being old, of course there was an app for this. Then she looked, and there was not. Pet grooming ran on phone calls and paper diaries, much as it had for 30 years. Tuft launched in June 2021 to fix it.
Challenges we have overcome
A two-sided marketplace is hard to start. We needed groomers and pet owners on board at once, but neither side would join before the other was there. Sponsorships, a constant presence at grooming events and partnerships with well known groomers gave us the credibility to break the deadlock.
The build was the second barrier. Tuft is not only a booking app. It covers calendars, payments, deposits, reminders, consent forms and pet profiles. Many groomers had never used digital tools, so we made it simple with serious capability underneath, backed by support six days a week averaging a four minute response.
Educating the market took longest. Groomers were wary of replacing something that had worked for decades, so we had to prove value fast. Deposits did it. Salons using deposit rules see up to 81% fewer no-shows.
Funding took persistence. Chloe met extra resistance raising money as a woman in tech, but traction and a clear route to profitability got us over £1.2 million.
Industry impact
Tuft has processed more than 362,000 bookings for 5,624 groomers and over 83,000 pet owners. Our first 25,000 took 668 days. We now pass 25,000 every two months, and a third of everything we have ever handled happened in the past year. 43% of bookings arrive while salons are closed, appointments that once depended on someone answering the phone.
More than 68% of bookings now run through our own payment rail. We started as a calendar and became the layer the money moves through. Our platform fee grows only as groomers get busier.
Kelly at KD Grooming Studio manages more than 1,500 dogs on Tuft and has cut her workload by more than half. She has since opened a second salon and runs that on Tuft too.
We ship constantly. This year alone: Cards on File, so a groomer can charge a no-show fee rather than write it off, email reminders on every plan, a groomer app, and confirmation links that bring terms and deposits to clients who never use the app. Rosey, our scheduling algorithm, sits behind the calendar.
Rivals charge add-ons for SMS credits. Tuft includes unlimited messaging from £35 a month, with a free forever plan underneath.
The marketplace is the hardest thing we built and the reason we are hard to copy. Every rival sells tools to businesses that already have clients. We had to build the consumer side too. It means a newly qualified groomer can join with an empty diary and leave with a full one. No other grooming platform in the UK does both.
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