Client Stories.
We partner with smart people working on solving interesting problems. We interviewed a handful of our clients about their work.

Grocery shopping, banking, buying shoes, dating — people will do almost anything online these days. But there isn’t an app that can cut your hair (yet), so the salon industry is still largely an offline world.

When it comes to personal grooming — and stocking up on your favourite hair products — most of us rely on brick and mortar shops. And maybe because of this, consumers don’t enjoy the same selection and availability in hair care products that they might for other goods. Rob Gaspar set out to solve this problem. He’s bringing the individualized service and special attention you get in a salon chair to his new online shop. 

Since the age of 15, Rob has worked in salons. “I started out shampooing hair and mopping floors, but I was determined about where I wanted to be. I didn’t just want to be a great hairdresser, I wanted to own my own shop,” he explains. 

Rob has been mastering every aspect of the hair industry for the past 25 years. After opening his own salon, Mast Hair in 2018, he set his sights on a new opportunity. “I would work on clients for ten hours a day, but I knew there was more to it than just being behind the chair. I started seeing weaknesses in men’s hair care lines, and that got me thinking,” he says.

I would work on clients for ten hours a day, but I knew there was more to it than just being behind the chair. I started seeing weaknesses in men’s hair care lines, and that got me thinking.

For Rob, there was a gap in the market. “The product that’s out there is either really expensive or really cheap. You have barber shop brands or cheap brands that cater to drug stores. I knew from working with my clients that men just wanted something that was clean and high-quality, with branding that connected to them,” he says. “I knew that if I could develop a product I liked, there would be a market for it.”

The process for developing and marketing haircare products hasn’t changed much over the years. Traditionally, you create something, put it in a bottle and push it to distributors. Rob set out to change that. He created his own line and brought it directly to his customers through his salon and website. “I wanted something that got rid of the fluff. Something catering to guys who are busy, travelling and on the go—but who are spending $50 on a haircut and want something nice for themselves,” he explains. “I took all the best aspects of men’s lines I’ve worked with, and created my own.”

I’m proud of how quickly we were able to develop a brand. We were able to take an idea and build it within a calendar year. We opened our first brick and mortar location, developed two products, designed packaging, launched our site and subscription service.

We helped Rob realize his vision for a direct-to-consumer line of well-designed hair care products with a holistic online and in-store experience. We helped him come up with the Mast Brand, designed the website and ordering experience, as well as the packaging for the physical products. 

In less than a year and a half, Rob brought his offline salon experience to a new digital space. “I’m proud of how quickly we were able to develop a brand. We were able to take an idea and build it within a calendar year. We opened our first brick and mortar location, developed two products, designed packaging, launched our site and subscription service,” he says. With plans to add two more products and another location in Calgary, Mast continues to grow its community across Canada with the help of his online shop — now open 24/7. 

As it stands, online service for banking customers has lagged behind other retailers. Large banks—like RBC or TD—typically act as end-to-end organizations that offer the full gamut of banking services, from business banking, to personal banking, to wealth management and insurance. But if you look at the websites of most large, multi-service banks today, it’s not possible for a customer to sign up for all the different products in the bank’s suite in one go. Shashank Tripathi and his team at Zafin are working to change that. 

Shashank leads the product vision for Zafin. He built his career in the banking world, so he has a deep understanding of what banks struggle with—and what their customers are looking for. Shashank has leveraged his unique vantage point to develop a platform at an accelerated speed—and within a budget that makes innovating on a large scale much more palatable to banks with millions of customers. 

“Traditionally, innovation is heavily focused on core banking technologies—but not necessarily things that make life easier for users,” Shashank explains. “We recognized an opportunity for signing up users, which is something we call Digital Onboarding.”

We recognized an opportunity for signing up users, which is something we call Digital Onboarding.

Typically, a bank’s end user would have to individually (and arduously) sign up for 12 separate products separately. That would mean filling out 12 forms—with essentially the same information every single time. Zafin recognized that streamlining this process was a big opportunity to improve the experience for customers.

He compares Zafin’s vision for their platform to an experience like Amazon’s ecommerce website. Just as you would add multiple products to your cart and checkout in one transaction, with Zafin, you can sign up for a chequing account, TFSA and RRSP account and a line of credit—and do it all at once. 

The Zafin team has put a lot of fanatical attention on user experience design, which has not traditionally been the strong suit of the financial sector. And if banks were to create this functionality completely in-house, they would typically partner with a large consulting firm. “Their ITP’s would be involved, it would be a big mothership of a project for three-to-five years. It would take multi-billion dollars and a lot of program management. That whole shebang would happen and at then end, the project is over budget and there is a lot of slippage on the delivery time,” says Shashank.

Be nimble in what you bring to market first, and then continue to enhance progressively. A lot of start-ups struggle with what their Minimum Viable Product should look like.

Enter Zafin’s solution: the customizable, scalable platform—instead of an insular, one-off product. Banks can white label this software so the end user sees their branding, language and unique experience. “We make sure that they have customizations—like the kind of documents needed for their onboarding journey. Bank by bank, there are policy departments that have slightly different stipulations on those requirements. As long as we cater to those customizations, in three-to-six months they can have a presence in the market—having spent a fraction of what it would have cost to develop it in-house,” he explains. 

We asked Shashank if he had any advice for other entrepreneurs who are designing a platform that they want to scale. He told us, “be nimble in what you bring to market first, and then continue to enhance progressively. A lot of start-ups struggle with what their Minimum Viable Product should look like. Especially in businesses that are B2B, because it’s hard to say no to a client,” he explains. For Shashank, it’s more important to get a product out to market early for a client than to make sure it’s the absolutely idealized version. You can always rapidly and progressively enhance a product after release. 

While Zafin is currently laser-focused on client number one, their larger goal is to rapidly improve upon the platform so other clients in North America can integrate it as well. Zafin is in a trailblazing space, with a mission to continue improving on functionality every step of the way. Soon, you may just be saving a lot of time signing up for new services and accounts. And that's a bonus you can take to the bank.