Styld

Nairobi first. Beauty, properly arranged.

Book beauty with the same trust you give a person you already know.

STYLD is a trust-first beauty marketplace being built in Kenya. It puts the client plan, the provider's work and the agreement between them on one server record, so nothing has to be guessed from a screenshot or a phone call.

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The product is a private beta that we open by hand, one person at a time, and this page asks for none of your data.

The gap STYLD is built to close

Trust is decided off-platform

A client asks a friend, then a WhatsApp group, then hopes. Nothing about that choice is recorded, so a bad experience teaches the market nothing.

The plan lives in someone's head

Braids, nails, makeup and skin are booked as separate conversations with separate prices and separate times. The whole look has no single owner.

Good work is hard to prove

A professional's skill shows in their chair and on their phone, not in a portfolio a client can compare or a platform can verify.

We describe the problem we are solving. We are not quoting market sizes, provider counts or retention figures we cannot show you in a database.

How a client moves through STYLD

  1. 01

    Discover

    Browse services and creator profiles, filter by what you actually need, and read listed information rather than a sales pitch.

  2. 02

    Compare

    Shortlist providers and put them side by side on the same facts: service, listed price, location and mode.

  3. 03

    Plan

    Build one beauty plan for the occasion. It is revision-controlled, so a change you make and a change someone else makes cannot overwrite each other.

  4. 04

    Agree

    Send a provider a request to discuss the plan. They accept or decline in the product, and the decision is stored. Live booking commitments and payments are still being connected.

The STYLD plan screen in the private beta, headed Plan your beauty visit, with a searchable service catalogue, category filters and the line Your plan is empty. Choose a service to get started. A banner above states that listings include sample data and that bookings, purchases and payments are unavailable.
The plan surface in the beta, captured from the test build against an isolated test database holding one QA account. The service list is the shipped sample catalogue, and the page says so on screen: catalogue interests do not confirm a provider or a price.

Six beauty worlds, not one default look

Personalisation is a product decision, not a theme picker. Each world changes the palette, the surfaces, the motion and the way recommendations are framed, and the client chooses how strong it feels: Calm, Balanced or Immersive.

Pure

Clean, warm and quiet. Pure is the original Styld canvas.

The Romantic

Soft colour, graceful detail and a warm finish for celebration beauty.

The Earth Woman

Earthy colour, calm surfaces and care that puts hair and skin health first.

The Seeker

Deep quiet, soft light and a slower rhythm for restorative care.

The Daughter of the Soil

Warm clay, woven pattern and proud texture-led beauty.

The Muse

Warm neutral colour, clean lines and a quiet premium finish.

The STYLD beauty world chooser in the beta: six worlds as cards, Pure, The Romantic, The Earth Woman, The Seeker, The Daughter of the Soil and The Muse, with The Romantic marked Selected and a preview panel describing the colours, buttons, glass and atmosphere of the world being viewed.
The world chooser, captured from the reviewed beta branch built for production. The note above the cards is the product's own: a world shapes recommendations and visual mood, it does not change bookings or payments.
The same beauty world chooser on a phone-sized screen, with each world readable as its own card and the controls large enough for a thumb.
The same screen at phone width. The six worlds remain readable as individual cards on a phone.

Where professionals and salons fit

One identity, many workspaces

A person can be a client, a professional and a salon on a single account. Each workspace keeps its own profile, services and requests, so the identity does not have to be duplicated.

Work that can be reviewed

Creators publish looks to a feed that goes through a moderation queue before it is public. The queue decision is a server record, not a promise.

Applications, not open doors

Professional and salon access is granted through an application that an administrator reviews. Retail shops and delivery fleets are deliberately closed while the marketplace side is proven.

The STYLD discovery feed in the beta with the Looks tab open, showing zero visual looks and the message No published looks yet, with the line Looks from professionals and salons appear here once they are published.
The discovery feed on the test build, empty because no look has been published in this database. No provider profile, post, review or price in any frame on this page is invented.

What works today, and what is still being tested

Implemented for beta testing

  • Email one-time-passcode sign-in, with sessions that are independent per device.
  • Discovery of services and public creator profiles. The catalogue still carries the shipped sample listings, and the product says so above them rather than presenting them as businesses.
  • The beauty plan, with revision control and optimistic locking.
  • Shortlist and side-by-side compare.
  • Six beauty worlds with three intensity levels.
  • Requests to discuss a plan, accepted or declined by the provider on record.
  • Community publishing behind a moderation queue, and private saves, blocks and reports.
  • Restricted media delivery: a pending image is only reachable by its owner or an MFA-verified reviewer, through a short signed window.
  • Administrator routes behind MFA, with an audit trail of decisions.

Not enabled yet

  • Live booking commitments. The product will not accept a booking until real pricing and availability are connected; it says so on screen instead of pretending.
  • Payments. No gateway is live and no card or M-Pesa charge is taken.
  • Reviews. Nothing is shown as a review until a completed service is proven by a server record.
  • Verified-provider badges. Not issued, so not displayed.
  • Public image uploads. Held pending moderation.
  • Shop and Delivery roles. Registration of interest only.
  • Closed sign-up. The sign-up screen is reachable today and the product has no invitation gate in it, so opening this beta one person at a time is how the team works, not something the software enforces while the security gates are being closed.

These features are implemented in the beta build. Hosted authentication, database isolation and mobile-device acceptance testing are still in progress. Live bookings and payments are not available.

Trust is a build decision

Server-side authorisation

Roles and workspaces are resolved from the session on the server. A request that names someone else's account gets a refusal, not that account's data.

Fail closed

Where a gate is not configured, the route refuses. Uploads, reviews, payments and booking commitments are unavailable by default rather than optimistic.

Honest language

The product never tells a customer that something is confirmed, secured or verified unless the record proves it. That rule applies to this page too.

Why Nairobi, and why now

Nairobi's beauty economy already runs on relationships: the braider a cousin recommends, the braider who knows your hairline, the salon that answers at 9pm. That knowledge is real, and it is also completely offline.

We are starting in one city, with one category we can do properly, and with the records we would need to prove quality later. A marketplace earns trust city by city, and a beauty platform earns it appointment by appointment. Once the plan, the agreement and the provider record hold in Nairobi, the same structure carries to the next city without inventing a new product.

See the working product

The fastest way to understand STYLD is to watch a plan get built and a provider answer it in the beta. We will walk an investor through the live build, the records behind it and the gates that still have to close before the public launch.

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