A website as premium as the salon — and a performance score of 99
Barberhood is a high-end gents salon in Dubai offering far more than a standard barbershop. Its old Laravel site said none of that. A new React build took performance from 57 to 99, an automated journey now carries customers from first message to post-visit review, and within two weeks of launch the owner reported that new customers saw the business differently.
The challenge
Dubai is a visual city and first impressions carry real commercial weight. Barberhood is a premium gents salon — a broader, more elevated offer than a basic barbershop — and its customers almost all arrive via a phone screen before they ever arrive in person.
The old website was built in Laravel, and it was basic. Not premium, not on brand, and slow: a performance score of 57 meant visitors on mobile connections were waiting, and some of them were leaving before the page finished telling them anything.
The site was undercutting the business at exactly the moment a new customer was deciding whether this place was for them.
What we did
The site was rebuilt from scratch in React, designed to stand out in a market where looking the part is the price of entry, and engineered so it loads fast on mobile where the customers actually are. The booking path was treated as the design brief rather than a page buried in the navigation.
Around it we built the customer journey as automation: the welcome funnel starts at the first hello message and carries through booking, booking confirmation, reminders, and then post-visit review requests and follow-ups — so the experience after the haircut is as considered as the one during it.
We also integrated Contentful, wired to their own AI chatbot, so the team publishes blog posts, FAQs, and on-page SEO themselves. Everything short of backlinks can now be handled in-house without a developer in the loop.
The results
Performance went from 57 to 99, turning a site that made people wait into one that loads almost instantly on mobile.
The commercial signal came fast: within two weeks of launch, Barberhood reported back that the new site had already changed how new customers perceived the business.
Bookings now run through an automated journey from first contact to follow-up, and the salon can publish its own SEO content without going back to a developer.
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