We caught up with UK & Ireland managing director, Miranda Mathews, to discuss her role at Treatwell and the future of the hair industry.
Since 2008, Treatwell has been on a mission to ‘digitally revolutionise the hair and beauty community’. Currently, the management software company works with over 40,000 partners globally, across 13 countries. Miranda has spent the last decade leading various technology organisations through inception to scaling globally and her passions lie in mentoring young women and supporting small businesses. She is playing a key role in transitioning the business from a marketplace focused offering to a software first proposition – ensuring that Treatwell’s current and future digital products genuinely meet the needs of salon and barbershop owners throughout the country.
“I first started my career in the beer industry, for one of the biggest companies in the world and it was a really amazing experience because although it’s such a large business, it was very much, here’s your car keys and your territory, good luck – grow your business.” Explains Miranda, telling us that this training ground gave her the freedom to be entrepreneurial in her approach throughout her career.
After a while Miranda found that the role had become “stagnant” within such a large company so she looked for a new challenge at a start-up in the food technology business, specifically a mobile marketplace focused on optimising the way consumers could pick up food and coffee. “My role within that business was to grow our partner base. I started out in Toronto, where I’m from, and helped expand that business and then very quickly I was on the road selling into the US,” she says citing this role where she was required to set up business fundamentals during expansions, as a pivotal learning experience: “I was wearing every hat – sales, marketing, operations, and people operations throughout Canada and the US, and eventually the UK and Germany.”
It was in this capacity that Miranda made the move to Treatwell, she tells us: “I was managing sales and account teams and that’s primarily the makeup of my team now. There was an interesting crossover between what I was doing previously and what we’re doing at Treatwell.” Miranda has just celebrated her one-year anniversary with the company, having joined at a time of great change, she explains: “The company is going through a transformative time, most people know us for our marketplace, but we’ve launched a brand new sophisticated software that is now our core value driver.”
Using her experience in her previous role, Miranda has been able to effectively guide the transition at Treatwell, she tells us her experience was key to Treatwell’s goals: “We were a marketplace and very focused on growing our marketplace, but during covid everything stopped. People had to work from home and our whole user base basically shut down overnight. We pivoted to become a SAS first company. Moving from being marketplace to software was a massive transition and I was able to bring some learnings to the transition we are now going through at Treatwell.”
Whilst Treatwell is going through its own period of change, Miranda reflects on what the future may hold for the hair industry: “There has been an increase in men’s grooming services over the last year, so I think we’ll see these services continue to grow,” Miranda tells us. In the wake of Covid-19 she also tells us that it is slowly becoming the norm to be digital, however the hair industry still needs to catch up: “Over half of salons and shops are still using pen and paper, so it is a lot slower in changing but people are getting there slowly and starting to see the value in adapting to software solutions to enhance their business,” she says, whilst acknowledging that the technology space is one that has become increasingly competitive therefore she remains focused on the value she can provide to end users and partners.
As a patron of the British Beauty Council, Miranda is excited about the potential for change: “Having initiatives and a place for change-makers to work together on issues from sustainability to diversity, such as having more women in STEM roles, particularly in technology and production, makes me hopeful for the future.”