“Cloud POS”
A cloud-native point-of-sale platform for the salon & spa industry, designed to free businesses from local databases and make their data agile and secure.
“Cloud POS” was the working title while in development: a modern, slimmed-down release planned to grow into the full feature set of our existing platform, rebuilt responsive, touch-first, and ready for any device on the floor.
A point of sale, lifted to the cloud
The goal was to replace heavy on-site databases with a cloud-native platform, one that kept salons agile, kept their data safer, and could be picked up on a desktop, a tablet, or a touch terminal without missing a beat.
Launch modern and slimmed-down, then grow into everything the current platform can do, without ever asking a salon to babysit a server.
A flow for every action
Before any screen was finalized, we drew up user flows for every action a user could take. It kept the whole team clear on what happens when, and guaranteed there were no dead-ends, that every piece of data could be created, edited, or removed.
Booking flows also had to adapt to the type and size of the business: a walk-in shop, a salon, and a full-service spa each have very different needs.
One platform, the right door for each role
Owners didn’t want every function and every figure exposed to every employee on the front end. So sensitive data and top-down controls lived in a separate, planned back end that emulated the existing one, but with higher-level organization, an improved design, and more task-focused sections.
The platform map below shows how each user group, from super admins and owners to management, staff, and guests, gets a personalized home and a tailored set of tools, all backed by long-standing customer feedback.
Built to wear the client’s brand
Branding was baked in from the start. If you’re a Fantastic Sams, it should look like a Fantastic Sams app, Supercuts would look like Supercuts, and a guest who opens it should never see a competitor’s locations. The point was to keep each brand’s customers inside their own ecosystem.
Clients sent a short list of design collateral; that copy of the codebase shipped to the app stores under their name, logos, and colors. On the back end, the API recognized which brand was calling and filtered every result to match.
Neither Guest Pass nor “Cloud POS” ever made it to launch. The company folded before the apps could ship, so what you see here is the work as it stood, designed, mapped, and ready for the app stores, but was only ever used in a couple dozen test stores.
Reflection
Designing “Cloud POS” was an exercise in restraint: ship something modern and slim, but architect it so it could grow into a full platform without a rebuild. Mapping every flow first, and keeping guest data modular, is what made that possible.
A point of sale is only as good as the calendar the team trusts and the guest record behind it. Get those two right, and everything else has somewhere to grow.
Built modern, planned modular, and mapped end-to-end before a single screen shipped.