By Cate Jensen
Getting a mid-afternoon mani just got a whole lot easier for the women of Northern Virginia. PrettyQuick, a Chicago-based beauty app has made its way to our area, thanks to its delightful, intelligent and savvy creator Coco Meers. The app, which Meers developed at business school and perfected during a flight delay in which she didn’t know how to spend the new free time she had been given. PrettyQuick can be described as Open Table meets Uber or as she explains: “it is the reservations of open table with the location space and real time nature of Uber.” With filters from “no frills” to “luxe,” a beauty-obsessed woman can get just about get anything she wants.
What made you want to create an app such a PrettyQuick?
I was inspired to make it easier for women to book beauty. I don’t think that taking time for yourself should be time consuming, it should be simple. But there is a real question of where to go, Google can tell you who is close and Yelp can tell you what random strangers think about a place but coming from the industry, I know how important trust is – this is your hair, this is your skin, your nails, these are intimate parts of your body that you want to make sure you are putting in the right hands.
How does your editorial panel go about picking the salons that will be added to PrettyQuick?
In every city we work with, we have an editorial panel who goes in and takes a look, making sure that we have the right form and each neighborhood on board.The panel is made up of bloggers and beauty influencers city by city. In D.C. we have the women [behind] So Much to Smile About and Politics of Pretty and we are adding to the panel. We are looking for more experts locally.We have [the salons] go through two different steps. The first step is what are our top picks for the area. If they [the panel] have been to a place before and they like it – we let them in. They already have a vote of confidence. The business owner has a great reputation, the pictures are beautiful, checks every single box – we do our due diligence.
If there is any question at all, that is when we send an editor in to check it out and make sure it does fit the network. If it is not up to snuff – cleanliness is important to us, quality is so important, service — not just looking at the high end places, we have Park Hyatt, we have the Peninsula we have all the fancy places nationwide. However, we have the hidden gems, neighborhood by neighborhood. Sometimes you don’t want that $80 manicure, but you want in and out.
Why the D.C. area now?
D.C. is perfect for us. When we looked at the demographics of D.C. and saw the number of professional women, combined that with the city and the closeness of the suburbs, we just thought this is absolutely perfect. You have women working late, managing families, and a lot on their plates but in a geographic environment that we can manage and execute well. We could give them the right offering.