Revolutionary beauty and wellness platform launches
Susana Tamega - Founder of Glam Savvy
Queenstown entrepreneur Susana Tamega is today launching an online platform to help beauty and wellness professionals bring in new clients during quieter periods.
Glam Savvy offers half-priced beauty and wellness appointments for services such as manicures, massages, haircuts, yoga classes, and personal training.
Health and beauty providers sign up and offer the discounted rates to increase appointment bookings in their quieter parts of the day.
Users pay a flat $5 fee to enjoy the 50% discount being offered by some of Queenstown’s top beauty and wellness providers.
It’s a win-win arrangement that helps providers get new clients through the door in quiet periods while allowing clients to discover the very best of what beauty and wellness services their city has to offer.
The service launches for Queenstown today, with the rest of New Zealand cities soon to follow.
The idea for Glam Savvy came to Tamega thanks to inspiration from her native home of São Paulo, Brazil and from her partner's business, First Table.
“In São Paulo, it’s common for beauty and wellness studios to offer discounted rates on Tuesdays and Thursdays which are typically the quieter days of the week,” she says.
“This is a great way to try out new beauty and wellness services and I would eventually become a loyal patron of many of these places after trying out their services at a reduced rate.
“When I moved to New Zealand four years ago, I realised this system didn’t exist and have always thought there was a good opportunity to bring a similar concept here. Glam Savvy is exactly that.”
Startup Queenstown Lakes [SQL] helped Tamega flesh out her idea through a new online course called LIFT OFF!, where she worked closely with Business Advisor Marco Dingemans.
Tamega praised Marco and the SQL team for encouraging and assisting her in journey along the way.
“Marco was great on providing me useful feedback and motivating me to launch and to stick to my goals.
“He was very accommodating on listening to my needs instead of just following a script.”
Tamega says she was spurred into action over New Zealand’s nationwide lockdown earlier this year; she had time on her hands to finally make Glam Savvy a reality.
"As a psychiatrist, I’ve always appreciated how important beauty and wellness therapies are for mental health. During lockdown, that became even more evident and this motivated me to focus on launching Glam Savvy.”
“I believe that if you look after yourself, you can look glamorous and feel fabulous!"
She says the timing for launch couldn’t be better. Beauty and wellness providers are often small businesses eager for patronage at the moment, and lockdown gave many Kiwis an opportunity to appreciate just how important looking good and exercising is to physical and mental wellbeing.
Tamega is a registered psychiatrist who runs her own wine tour business in Queenstown, so she’s no stranger to entrepreneurship.
Her partner, Mat Weir, is the founder of First Table: a platform which offers a similar service to Glam Savvy for restaurants and diners.
