The before
Visions Studio opened in Capital City, Lilongwe in 2021 — Chimwemwe Banda’s first business after a decade running chairs in other people’s salons. Six chairs, four full-time stylists, a steady book of repeat clients, and one operating system: a paper appointment diary.
By the start of 2026 the diary was the bottleneck:
- Bookings happened over WhatsApp; whoever was nearest the diary wrote them down
- A no-show rate of ~25% — a stylist sat idle for an hour every other slot
- Three different mobile-money wallets to receive payments (Mpamba personal, Airtel Money personal, a card terminal that mostly didn’t work)
- A handwritten ledger reconciled to deposits on Sundays
- Stylists couldn’t see their own week without finding the owner first
The decision
Visions evaluated three salon-software options. Two of them were international SaaS products with USD pricing and clearly built around card-based payments — neither would have worked for a Malawian client base paying via mobile money. The third was Letts Commerce.
What sealed the decision wasn’t the appointment book — it was the unified payment settlement. One wallet, MWK, daily, all three providers consolidated.
The 30-day rollout
- Week 1 — Setup + chair calendar. Each chair set up in LettsPOS as a resource. Service catalogue (cuts, colour, treatments, kids’) priced and time-boxed. Booking widget published on the salon’s social profile.
- Week 2 — Migrating clients. The previous WhatsApp client list imported. Booking links shared on first contact. The first self-service bookings landed within 48 hours.
- Week 3 — SMS reminders + payment consolidation. 24-hour SMS reminders activated; the no-show rate halved within two weeks. Mpamba + Airtel Money + cards consolidated into one Letts wallet.
- Week 4 — Daily P&L + stylist commissions. LettsOS configured with daily P&L and per-stylist commission tracking. Commissions paid weekly via mobile money in one click.
What changed
“We had three different mobile-money apps before Letts. Now everything settles into one wallet, MWK, daily. My books take an hour a month instead of a Sunday. And no-shows went from 1-in-4 to 1-in-8.”
Three months in:
What the salon team mentions first:
- Stylists own their week. Each stylist sees their own calendar in the LettsPOS app on their phone. They can take direct bookings from regular clients without going through the front desk.
- Online bookings overnight. Approximately 35% of bookings now come in outside business hours through the booking widget — clients schedule when it suits them.
- The Sunday reconciliation is gone. Three mobile-money apps consolidated into one Letts wallet. A monthly close that used to take a Sunday now takes an hour on the first of the month.
- Walk-in upsells. When the calendar shows a 60-minute gap on a particular chair, the front desk now actively offers walk-ins a treatment that fits. Chair idle time dropped sharply.
What's next
Visions is opening a second studio in Area 47 in late 2026. With the platform handling appointment routing, payments, commissions, and inventory across both sites, the second-location effort is now mostly fit-out and recruitment.
Chimwemwe’s parting note for salon owners considering the move:
“A salon is a chair-utilisation business. Everything else is overhead. When the platform shows you which chair is empty, when a no-show is about to happen, when a stylist has a 60-minute window — you make better decisions in real time. The diary couldn’t do any of that.”
Products used
- LettsPOS — appointments, services catalogue, payments, mobile-money settlement
- LettsOS — daily P&L, stylist commission tracking, inventory for product retail
Want to dig deeper?
- Letts Commerce for Salons — vertical landing page covering appointments, stylists, and chair utilisation
- Letts Commerce in Malawi — TNM Mpamba + Airtel Money + MWK pricing context
- Talk to our services team — happy to share salon-specific operational detail