Payzli
A point of sale for salons, built so the front desk can book the next client fast.
Fintech
Point of Sale
Role
Founding & Lead Product Designer
Timeline
2024 to present
team
Two people
platform
Web and POS
The Real Problem
Payzli is a point of sale for salons, spas, and barbershops. If you have not worked with that kind of business, picture the person at the front desk: they are booking the next appointment, answering the phone, ringing up a sale, and telling a walk-in it will be twenty minutes, all at the same time. It started as a checkout and grew into the system a salon runs its whole day on, appointments, staff, inventory, marketing, multiple locations. But the piece people actually live in, the one that makes or breaks a busy Saturday, is booking.
Most point of sale products in this space look and behave like they were designed a decade ago. Dense screens, tiny buttons, a booking flow that assumes you have both hands free and a spare minute. Merchants put up with them because switching is a pain, not because they are good. That was the opening. The new generation of salon owners does not want an enterprise console, they want something that feels like the apps they use everywhere else in their life.
So the brief I set myself was not "add more to the POS." It was to make the thing people touch a hundred times a day feel modern, and make the one action they repeat most, booking an appointment, genuinely fast.
The Decision
The first real decision was to refuse the obvious one. The safe move was to copy the traditional POS layout everyone already knows. I did not want a copy. I wanted Payzli to look and feel like a product built this decade, something a merchant would show off rather than apologise for.
The Booking Flow
The booking flow is where that got specific. On a traditional system, booking a client means bouncing between screens: pick a service, pick a stylist, hunt for a free slot, go back because the stylist you picked is busy, start again. I rebuilt it around what the front desk is actually trying to do, which is find the next thing that works and lock it in. Instead of making them read a full calendar and work out the gaps, the system surfaces only the slots that are genuinely open for the service and stylist in play. Fewer clicks, no back and forth, and a lot less of that awkward pause where the customer stands there while you scroll.
Turn Fairness
One detail I am glad I caught: salons care about fairness, not just speed. Stylists share walk-ins on a turn basis, and if the software hands every booking to whoever is free first, someone quietly gets shorted all day. So I built the booking around turn count, so the system keeps the rotation fair on its own. It is the kind of thing you only notice if you have watched a salon floor, and it is exactly what makes staff trust the tool instead of working around it.
The Pushback
The resistance did not come from merchants. It came from engineering. A traditional layout is easier to build, so the pressure was to ship the familiar thing. I spent a solid two weeks defending the newer design, arguing that "easier to build" and "better for the merchant" were not the same trade. It is a fight I would rather not have had, but it is the reason Payzli does not look like everything else on the shelf.
What Changed
The signal I cared about was booking speed, and it moved. Because the flow only ever shows slots that genuinely work, the front desk stopped going back and forth over times and stylist availability, and those small moments of confusion at the counter mostly disappeared. Faster than the traditional POS it replaced, and quieter at the desk, which in a salon is its own kind of proof.
The moment it clicked for me was not in a review or a dashboard. A salon owner was using the new build, pointed at the screen, and said, "This doesn't feel like work, it feels like I'm playing a game." A stressed business owner calling a point of sale fun is not a sentence you hear often. That was when I knew we had moved past "a tool you put up with" and into something people actually wanted to use.
In 2026 Payzli made the Inc. 5000 at number 1183, on 297% revenue growth over three years. I will not claim a booking flow did that on its own. But the product is what merchants kept choosing, and the product is what I drew.
What I'd Do Differently
If I did it again, I would bring engineering into the concept phase far earlier. I spent two weeks fighting for the UI after it was already designed. Had I pulled the engineers in during wireframing and put the time-per-booking numbers in front of them then, we would have skipped the "traditional is safer" debate entirely, and I would have spent those two weeks building instead of defending. The design was right. The thing I would fix is when I brought people along.
The goal was never a better checkout screen. It was to give a salon back the minutes it loses fighting its own software, and hand them to the person in the chair.
