Discover Nicolas, manager of the Big Moustache lounges

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Introduce yourself and your concept

Nicholas, I'm the founder of Big Mustache. Big Moustache is a men's skin care brand. What we mean by care is on the one hand products, we have developed a brand of care products: shaving, beard care, body care, etc..

And then on the other side, it's also the care we apply in our lounges. We've opened barbershops and hairdressing salons in Paris. We have 3 of them, and the idea is to extend the experience, we have the products in our bathroom on one side and we have the experience in the salon which allows us to have the advice and the application of our products by professionals.

What are your main missions?

The missions are precisely to make this project coherent. Online sales, razor blade subscriptions, the activity in the salons, and in all of these activities, the same message: that we're here to make men's morning routine more comfortable and enjoyable, and we're here to provide them with as much care as possible.

Our barbers are very involved in everything we do online as well, because we also do a lot of content, a lot of videos, tutorials, and so on. It's our barbers in our living rooms who do them. And conversely, online sales and everything we can produce on the site will also be useful to us in physical activity, since we talk a lot on the Internet to bring customers back to the salon.

The idea is to orchestrate all these teams but to link them together, whereas on paper they are very different professions. That's my main objective.

Big Mustache has a nice digital presence, how is it managed?

Big Moustache we were born on the Internet, so our strength is really our digital presence, social networks, blog, website, etc.. We're really going all out for it. In the team there are 4 people who really work on this activity. The Communication Manager is there to oversee the whole team, the speaking engagements, etc., and to give a bit of a lead on what we want to put forward, what we want to talk about and obviously look as far as possible.

Underneath, there are three people:

• There's one person who does nothing but photo and video to make all our photo and video content.
• There is one person who only does text writing, blog, newsletter, etc. which are all text lyrics. It's digital and a little bit physical.
• There's a person in charge of social networks in the broadest sense, it's managing the editorial line and everything else that comes along, and being as reactive as possible on the networks and providing a benchmark in relation to what's being done elsewhere and trying to find good ways to speak up and give a voice.

Big Mustache's next challenge?

What we want above all is to develop the brand. Today, we have a brand that is profitable in all its activities, both on the Web and in the physical world with trade fairs, and as much in products as in services. Tomorrow, our priority is really to be able to accelerate, which means raising additional equity capital so that we can give ourselves the means to become a benchmark brand. We have greatly expanded the product range, we have about forty products, once again: beard/moustache care, shaving.

We're going much more on the body and we're also tackling the hair market, because we also do hairdressing services in the salon, so the idea is to offer all the products. We have a lot of projects and we would like to do it all at the same time. The idea is to develop new products, find new distributors, in France and abroad. We have a brand that we want to export because all our products are Made in France, and we really want to export this product know-how and this care know-how that we bring to trade shows.

Does online booking work?

Online booking at Big Moustache is our main acquisition channel and most customers make appointments online. It's an indispensable tool because we have a big digital presence. Today, when we want to be a strong brand and offer the best service to customers, we have no choice but to offer online booking. For us, Wavy is the most efficient one, because it is the easiest and quickest, and that's what customers are looking for too. They don't want to create an account for that, they just want to choose a niche, a barber, one day, put a phone to receive the confirmation SMS and basta. Today we have about 80% of appointments that are taken online, it's also because we put a lot of emphasis on it. We sponsor publications on Facebook, Instagram, Google, to push this online booking.

An anecdote?

I don't have an anecdote but we have plenty of them because I actually work with the whole team in the middle of a show. It's a job we didn't know before, we share the space, we cohabitate I would say in this space. We have a lot of anecdotes because we are really in the heart of the reactor and in the heart of the living room. Whether it's children playing on Wednesdays in the middle of the office, a neighbour who passes by singing in the courtyard very regularly, clients who regularly drop by just to say "Hello" because they feel comfortable in the space. We have plenty of times when we'd like to work on something and we're in quotation marks "disturbed" to respond to a client. But afterwards, for us it's hyper beneficial and we know it's hyper positive.

We have to put in quotation marks "in the face of these little vagaries" to sometimes put up with music we don't like, to put up with the noise of hairdryers, but on the other hand we have the customers next to us, with us, and when we're developing a product we can turn to them and say "Sir, we're developing a product, can we use it on you?", "We're in the process of offering such and such a service, would you like it?", "We're changing that on the site, look at the iPad, would you like it or not?". It's a rich source of information for us, in any case we'll continue to quote "also to annoy our customers" and share our adventure with them.