About Vagaro
We're providing affordable, intuitive, user-friendly software and hardware products that foster business growth.
Our Mission
Vagaro strives to help small businesses and independent service professionals reach their objectives by bringing technology solutions that foster growth. Through innovative product offerings, Vagaro gives back a business owner's most valuable resource: time. Our products and services are designed to take the guesswork out of business operations, giving each business—no matter the size—the opportunity to thrive.
Our Values
Integrity
Community
Innovation
Excellence
Fast Facts of 2021
104m
Appointments Booked
$2.3b
Payments Processed
+174k
Service Providers
Milestones
1999
Fred Helou was in Korea for a two-week business trip. He realized he needed a haircut, but expensive long distance calling fees still existed back then, so he didn’t want to call to book an appointment with his hairstylist in the U.S. He wished there was a simple & easy way to schedule one online. It was then that the idea, which would later become Vagaro, was born. But with Fred’s child also on the way, business planning had to be put on the back burner.
2008
Along with many others, Fred was laid off by Novellus, where he was director of software, leading a development team for 15 product lines. Fred started looking at booking businesses, which were very expensive and available mostly as a download from CDs. Around this same time, the original iPhone launched, and mobile apps began to appear. He saw an opportunity for his business idea to take root.
2009
With seed money from his sister, brother-in-law and a couple of friends, Fred founded Vagaro as an affordable solution to businesses still using pen and paper for booking. The company’s first server was located in Fred’s guest bedroom closet.
2011
Within 18 months of its birth, Vagaro turned a profit and never looked back. Profitable and bootstrapped, Vagaro was free to develop its product without external investors and purely with the interest of its customers in mind.
The server in Fred’s closet was no longer handling the demand, and server management was moved to the cloud.
2014
Vagaro celebrated its 10,000th customer.
2016
Vagaro began offering its own Merchant Services to businesses in need of payment processing.
2018
FTV partners invested $63 million in Vagaro to help the company accelerate its already fast growth.
2020
Faced with a global pandemic threatening all businesses in Vagaro’s beauty, fitness & wellness verticals, the company gave away its software for free and developed a suite of features to help businesses stay open and ensure safety for everyone. Point-of-sale hardware (barcode scanners, cash drawers, receipt printers, credit card readers, etc.) was offered to customers and became so popular that the company had to open a warehouse to manage the demand.
2021
To better understand the salon space, Vagaro purchased three salons in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Facing continued demand for its POS hardware, Vagaro opended a second warehouse.
Credit card processing expanded to Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, unlocking the full suite of Vagaro features in those markets.
The company reached unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation, partnered with a new round of funding from FTV partners.
2022
The growing development team reached 170 employees.
Want to help us build the future of beauty, wellness & fitness?
Our goal is to help your business grow.
We believe deeply in the importance of goals. They give people a sense of purpose, a north star to help make decisions, a yardstick by which to measure progress, and they serve as a unifying cause to help large groups of people make progress in the same direction.
As businesses grow, goals become increasingly complicated and increasingly important. We are building a tool to help clarify and simplify the goal setting and tracking process so companies can direct their energy toward accomplishing their goals.
Our Values
