London Grace

London Grace – an award-winning nailcare brand uses Soldo to manage spending across seven stores

Industry

Retail

HQ

London

Employees

100

Key benefits

Opportunity to assign each company card to a store

Secure online payments​​

Automatic expense reconciliation​​

When Kirsten Hazell returned from living in New York, she saw a gap in the market for an affordable American-style nail salon with late opening hours. So, London Grace was born – living by the suitably sociable motto: ‘Nails, Coffee and Cocktails’. This is their story, and how Soldo helps.​

After launching in 2015, London Grace has become an award-winning nail bar and London’s biggest nailcare brand with seven stores across London and Essex.

Kirsten says: ‘My aim was to establish a branded lifestyle experience with beautiful store environments, high-quality products and refined treatments, but at affordable prices.’ The brand’s popularity shows that Kirsten has already achieved several of those goals.

“Soldo has worked well for us as we can tie each card to a store rather than a person.”

Lauren Williams
Director

The symptoms of success
But getting there took graft and included its fair share of challenges – mainly symptomatic of the business’ extraordinary success.

As the brand grew at breakneck pace, Kirsten found herself having to manage spending across several store locations. Before Soldo, London Grace used company credit cards but it was hard to manage spending by store, and visibility was limited. To make matters more complicated, team members were borrowing cards from senior members of staff, resulting in unnecessary risk and missed opportunities.

Today, London Grace uses Soldo Mastercard® cards. Assigning cards to stores, and not staff members, means all team members can make the payments needed in the course of business. Soldo also allows them to track spending and profitability by store.

‘Soldo has worked well for us as we have the flexibility to use the card online or physically in the store, or give it to one of the girls to get something from the shop as we can tie each card to a store rather than a person.’ With Soldo, Kirsten and her team have complete control and visibility over business-wide spending.

A rewarding enterprise
Continuing a trend, London Grace has recently grown to over 100 employees. Keen to keep their staff happy, they use Soldo to set budgets for team incentives, which means they can buy themselves cupcakes or other treats as a thank you for doing well.

Soldo has supplied the perfect payment and expenses solution for London Grace’s growing business, but Kirsten knows it’s just one small step on the way to achieving her vision.

Before embarking on the next adventure, Kirsten allows herself a moment to reflect on her business’ success to date: ‘Although it’s been a lot of hard work, I’m so proud of how far London Grace has come.’