CASE STUDY · DEW BEAUTY CO. · HUNTSVILLE, AL
356 women waiting.One stylist.One chair.
A fully booked luxury salon didn't need more demand. It needed capacity. We built the two systems that create it: a way to hire the second pair of hands, and a way to fund a bigger room.
01 — The challenge
DEW opened in Huntsville in October 2024. In under two years the book was full, a waitlist had formed, and one stylist in one chair was the ceiling. The constraint wasn't demand. It was capacity.
No careers page. Resumes arrived from Indeed into an inbox as PDFs, with no structure, no record of who was contacted, and no consistent way to compare candidates.
Every hiring decision would have rested on memory.
A lease on a larger building, a fixed opening date, and a plan to raise the buildout on a third-party crowdfunding platform.
That plan sent visitors from a branded page to someone else's checkout at the exact moment of commitment, lost all attribution, and took about 5% in platform fees on top of card processing.
And underneath it, the optics problem: a fully booked luxury salon asking the public for money invites the question, "If you're so successful, why do you need this?"
careers.dewbeautyco.com: one role, one page, one action, on DEW's own domain, with a private hiring system behind it.
Structured, comparable applications; automatic confirmations; a mobile-first admin built to be used between appointments; a record of every status change and every resume opened.
build.dewbeautyco.com: a $20,000 community campaign with Stripe checkout on DEW's own domain, about 3% all-in.
DEW owns every contributor record outright.
Framed as an invitation to join something already moving, not a request to rescue something struggling.
02 — The thinking
The project opened with a 26-section enterprise spec: multi-role postings, four permission tiers, weighted scorecards, analytics. We renegotiated to a defined middle. 14 build phases became 10. Eight written questions became four, because eight essays on a phone is where applicants quit.
A hard rule, written into every build prompt: no AI, scoring, ranking or automated decisions. Even a summary that says "strong communicator" is an evaluation, so nothing generative ever reads a candidate. Every decision is made by a person.
The database has no column for date of birth, race, religion, marital status, pregnancy, salary history, photo, or anything else a salon shouldn't ask. A policy memo can be forgotten. A missing column can't.
Pay appears in the third section, not the last: "The greater of $18/hour or 40% commission. A $195 head-spa service pays $78 in commission, plus 100% of your tip." Stylists who leave at the number should leave in ten seconds, not four minutes.
Moving someone to Declined at 11pm, tired, should never email the wrong person. Every candidate email is previewed exactly as it will arrive and confirmed by hand.
Three design directions failed: soft, austere, then muted. The unlock was using DEW's own site as the reference: gradients, a cut-out founder, bold type. The fourth pass shipped.
Stripe Checkout directly on build.dewbeautyco.com: no handoff to another domain at the moment of payment, no platform fee, and every contributor record stays with DEW. We still bought the payment processing. We built the front door.
The $500 tier originally offered priority booking ahead of the waitlist. A page that says 356 women are waiting can't sell a way past them. It became a private pre-opening tour with the founder. A permanent naming-rights tier was cut too, replaced by presenting sponsorship of the first Community Hair Day.
"Supporter," "contribute," "build" — never "donor" or "donate." DEW is a business, not a charity. Anything that read as rescue was removed, and the business's own investment is stated plainly.
03 — The system
04 — Try it
05 — Proof
14 of 14 tables locked with row-level security, enabled and forced
0 access rules for anonymous visitors: every public write goes through one checked function
0 prohibited columns, confirmed against a full column listing
17 security tests run by hand, outside the app
0 secrets in the production code
Submissions verified with PDF and DOCX resumes, the new-graduate path, four phone-number formats, and all three license statuses; a full application completed at 390px
Every resume opened is recorded by the server, and nobody (including the owners) can edit or delete that record
A real live payment completed end to end, with the confirmation email received
After the fix: every anonymous attempt to insert, change or delete a record refused; public reads still work
A record deleted during testing rebuilt in full from Stripe's payment record
A real applicant reached the final screen, pressed Submit, and got a vague error. She tried at least seven times over two days. The server had been saying exactly what was wrong — her phone number's format — and the page threw that message away. We made the page show the exact field and the fix, aligned the rules, and made the phone check more forgiving. Without her persistence, low applications would have looked like low interest.
A security scanner flagged a warning and the builder offered to dismiss it. We tested instead, and a visitor with no login could delete a real contribution record. The total dropped and a supporter's name disappeared. We revoked every write permission from the public, re-tested every probe until each was refused, and rebuilt the deleted record from Stripe. Caught with $50 at risk, not during a live campaign.
06 — If your ceiling is capacity, not demand.
07 — The outcome
“The website is perfect. The application is good. All of it is ready to go.”
Client
DEW Beauty Co., Huntsville, AL
T73 role
strategy, scope, UX and visual design, copy direction, build, security review, DNS migration, video and asset production
Brand identity
Jonae Bond
Brand line "We love your hair, you should too." and the About DEW copy
Dominque Willis
Footage and photography
DEW Beauty Co.
Built with
Lovable, Lovable Cloud, Stripe, Resend
Built
August 2026
“Full disclosure: DEW is the salon I co-own with my wife, Dominque.”
HEAL/ED