For this last issue of the season we are pleased to receive a very discreet entrepreneur from the FrenchTech ecosystem but whose solution is today a leader on the French market and deployed on several European markets, notably Germany where they occupy the second position of the podium. These are Antoine Puymirat, CEO and CO founder of Planity, a platform of services with hairdressers, and beauty salons. He returns to the Frenchweb club on the development of the company, the market, the product and the offer, how it structured its funding to deal with its growth.
Antoine Puymirat returns to a decade of experience in online booking (Active Hotels, Click Rendez-vous) before founding Planity in 2017 with a strong conviction: reservation in the beauty suffered from a poor product positioning. Where others had failed by imposing a model of commission Placed on Booking or Lafourchette, Planity opted from the start for a model by subscriptionmore suited to a sector where the customer loyalty is strong.
💡 This approach made it possible to build a business double -sided : SaaS management software + a market place generating visibility without marginal cost for pros.
Growth driven by distribution
Planity counts 50,000 pros customers in France, Germany and Belgium, with 12 million monthly users. What strikes is the persistence of the paper agenda as the main competitor. To convince, digitalization is done lounge by living roomvia an army of 250 salespeopleincluding 200 on the ground. It is a model of expansion heavy but effectivewith powerful network effects.
🧱 The growth engine is not the AI or the viral: it is the land sale and theLocalized snowball effect (Each new customer brings its end customers on the platform, generating qualified traffic).
PRAGMATIC PRADUCTION VISION
The Planity software goes far beyond the reservation: collection, loyalty, staff management, reminder sms, soon Tap-to-Pay. Each product development starts from customer needs raised by salespeopleand not a Parisian top-down. Antoine Puymirat insists on a culture of simplicity : avoid free complexities, get around problems, go fast and effectively.
🧠 Innovation is not technological, it is organizational : The field team dictates the product. Corporate culture is structured by this proximity to reality, not by corporate benchmarks.
European ambitions and consolidation
Despite a leading position in France and n ° 2 in Germany, Planity estimates that 92 % of the European market remains to digitize. The next step is market consolidation Via buyouts, but the valuations of 2021 are problematic. The goal is to become European reference actorwith a simple structure and few complex integrations.
Antoine Puymirat assumes a Counter-cyclical discourse : the funds did not jostle, the sector was deemed not very digitalizable, but Planity discreetly raised more 100 M € (Alven, Infravia…).
AI, exogenous threats and strategic positioning
Planity uses AI internally to automate tasks (OCR service sheets), with drastic productivity gains. But remain very cautious With regard to Google, Chatgpt or any reservations by AI: customer adoption Prime. The threat would not come as much from a competitor as a Tech platform (Google, Meta, Openai) integrating the reservation natively.
The structural risk identified: become dependent on a third -party interface (Google Maps, Chatgpt), losing control of customer relations. A lucid and strategic posture.
