Profile
The Woman Who Rewired the Beauty Economy
In 2009, Melody McCloskey was booking hair appointments the way everyone was: calling salons, leaving messages, waiting. She worked at Current TV, Al Gore's scrappy cable network, and spent her off-hours quietly cataloguing a frustration that kept compounding. The problem wasn't just consumer friction. It was that hundreds of thousands of talented beauty professionals were running their businesses on handwritten appointment books and word of mouth - invisible, underpaid, and wildly underserved by technology.
Two years later, she co-founded StyleSeat with Dan Levine. Neither of them was a developer. So they did the smarter thing: they hired someone who was, and then they got out of the office. For 18 months, McCloskey sat in salons. She watched stylists work. She listened to what they needed. That period of deep, unglamorous fieldwork is what separates StyleSeat from the dozens of booking tools that came before and after it. She wasn't building software. She was building infrastructure for a freelance workforce that had none.
StyleSeat's first investors noticed. Ashton Kutcher and actress Sophia Bush were among the angels who wrote checks in the 2012 seed round. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the Series A in 2014. Fosun Kinzon Capital led the $25 million Series B in 2015. Total raise: $40.7 million. Today, the platform operates in nearly 16,000 cities across the United States, with over 350,000 independent beauty and wellness professionals using it to run their businesses - scheduling, payments, client management, marketing, and more - and 10 million consumers using it to find and book them.
The number that McCloskey returns to most: in the first year on StyleSeat, average stylist revenue grew by 70 percent. That's not a metric about downloads or monthly active users. It's a metric about the lives of people running their own small businesses. Fast Company named her one of its Most Creative People in Business in 2014. She's written for TIME Magazine on workplace harassment and Entrepreneur on building companies. She now scouts investments through Cleo Capital, focused on female-founded startups at pre-seed through Series A - putting capital where she's put her career: behind the people who get overlooked first.
Melody McCloskey