A clear brief: Simplify, integrate, unlock store ROI
Learn how Hairhouse and Brauz are solving retail’s complexity gap by building the invisible infrastructure and rewired tech stack behind effortless omnichannel growth.
In Australian retail right now, the most interesting innovation often isn’t what customers can see on the shop floor – it’s the invisible infrastructure that makes each interaction feel effortless. For Hairhouse, one of the country’s largest hair and beauty specialists, that meant rethinking the systems behind bookings, inventory and fulfillment so staff could focus on experience, not wrestling with tech. Partnering with Brauz has helped the retailer strip out bottlenecks, simplify its stack and give teams the freedom to experiment and move quickly.
Filling the omnichannel gap
When Scott Murray joined Hairhouse as head of technology, he inherited a complex omnichannel environment: separate systems for bookings and retail, a mix of legacy POS and Shopify, and a heavy layer of custom NetSuite scripting powering ship from store. It technically worked, but the cracks were obvious to anyone trying to move at digital speed.
Previously, key order-routing rules – such as sending online orders to a customer’s “home store” so franchisees could share in ecommerce revenue – were buried in a lot of custom scripting in NetSuite, written by developers who had since left the business. Any change, whether adjusting which stores should be prioritised for fulfillment or tweaking free-delivery thresholds, triggered a development request and a wait.
We were bottlenecking a lot of agility and innovation just because it always required a dev to have a look at it.Scott Murray, Head of Technology, Hairhouse
For a franchise business where routing decisions directly impact store profitability and morale, that opacity and rigidity had become a strategic risk as much as a technical one.
In-store, the experience was no smoother. Hairhouse salons were using a standalone booking platform that didn’t talk to POS or ERP. Staff would take a booking on one system, print a receipt, walk it over to the till and manually re-key services and products. The process was slow, error-prone and out of step with what customers now expect from premium beauty and service-led retail.
A clear brief: Simplify, integrate, unlock store ROI
The transformation brief was simple to state and complex to execute: simplify the tech stack, deliver a genuinely seamless omnichannel experience and increase ROI from the store network. Hairhouse wanted an integrated booking solution that would live natively inside Shopify POS, as well as modern click and collect, find in store and ship from store capabilities that could open more stock to more customers without creating operational drag.
Murray already knew where to look. He had worked with Brauz in a previous role and understood how its local commerce platform could slot into Hairhouse’s emerging stack of Shopify, NetSuite and logistics partners such as Rendr. “Initially it was their booking system that we were looking at because it allowed a seamless integration with Shopify POS,” he said. “By using Shopify POS, that allowed us to simplify our tech stack and remove a lot of integration delay and back-office admin.”
Brauz’s philosophy – to live inside the retailer’s system of record rather than bolting on from the outside – also aligned neatly with Hairhouse’s decision to consolidate on Shopify for both ecommerce and in-store. “Brauz really fits into that model,” Murray noted. “They’ve made the functionality we want available in the Shopify retail system we want to use, so we’re able to then have that core stack and quickly add on things like links to Klaviyo for marketing, or Brauz for managing our ship from store and bookings.”
In other words, Hairhouse wanted the expressive, app-first feel of a modern digital brand, but at the scale and complexity of a national franchise network. Brauz was chosen to be a critical part of that operating system.
Turning hidden logic into a strategic control panel
One of the most powerful shifts has been moving Hairhouse’s intricate ship-from-store logic out of legacy NetSuite scripts and into Brauz’s configurable interface. Previously, rules about which store should fulfill a given order, how far to search geographically and when to revert to the warehouse were baked into code. Only a handful of people “half understood” how it really worked.
With Brauz, that same logic now lives in a user-friendly dashboard, not in opaque scripts.
The benefit, a key benefit there of moving to Brauz is all those rules are configurable in the user interface…Our ecommerce teams, our retail and marketing teams, they can administer that system without us having to come and change code all the time.Scott Murray, Head of Technology, Hairhouse
That change is more than cosmetic. It signals a shift in ownership, from central IT to the teams closest to the customer. If Hairhouse wants to change how many stores are checked before an order falls back to the warehouse, or alter routing rules to avoid disproportionately expensive shipping lanes, the relevant team can do it quickly. Free-delivery campaigns that once sat in a dev backlog can now be set up in minutes in response to trading conditions.
In a franchise environment, this transparency is critical. Franchisees can see that orders are being routed fairly and efficiently, and that when they participate in fulfillment, there’s a clear link to profit share. As Murray put it, the new setup “really greased the wheels” internally by replacing suspicion with visibility.
Giving franchisees a modern omnichannel cockpit
For frontline teams, Brauz has also redefined how Hairhouse stores manage the flow of online orders. Under the old NetSuite approach, stores had only a basic view: today’s orders, with minimal insight into value, margin or destination. Their role was to pick, pack and ship – often without a sense of whether they were truly winning from the arrangement.
Brauz’s interface is closer to what you’d expect from a digitally native brand than a traditional specialty retailer. Staff can now see richer details around each order, including content, value and likely margin implications. That gives franchisees the confidence to accept or decline orders based on a balanced view of customer outcomes and store economics.
“It’s all about trying to make sure the staff have a great experience,” Murray said. “In the previous system, there were a lot of unknowns and perhaps a lack of trust in the system… Brauz has made that transparent.” A phased rollout, starting with tech-forward franchise partners before expanding network-wide, helped Hairhouse manage risk and gave Brauz time to fine-tune for real-world salon and retail workflows.
This collaborative, phased approach is increasingly common among brands that sit at the intersection of beauty, services and retail – segments where the stakes for service breakdowns are uniquely high and expectations are shaped by streaming platforms and luxury ecommerce.
Reimagining the booking journey for a salon era that’s omnichannel
If logistics and inventory routing were urgent, bookings were existential. Hairhouse’s existing salon booking system sat entirely outside of POS and ecommerce. For customers, the effect was subtle but corrosive: clunky flows, repeated data entry and an experience that didn’t live up to the brand’s promise.
“In our retail stores, previously, we’d have a lot of friction where the booking system was a completely separate, non-integrated system,” Murray said. “You can imagine that process in-store… when you finish the booking, you have to then take that booking information, print a receipt and carry that over to the point of sale and then key the products in.”
Brauz’s booking solution, built to integrate natively with Shopify POS and NetSuite, collapses those steps into a single view. Staff can now see appointments, customers, loyalty status and available vouchers inside the POS interface, then process services and retail upsell in one fluid motion. “What we really wanted was something that just meant in your point of sale, once a customer’s finished an appointment, you can just bring up the point of sale, see the appointment, see the customer, quickly process it as a sale… and it’s all happening in the one system,” Murray explained. “That’s what’s now possible in our Shopify POS stores. It’s much, much better.” Murray explained. “That’s what’s now possible in our Shopify POS stores. It’s much, much better.”
Hairhouse didn’t just implement an off-the-shelf product; it co-designed the evolution of Brauz’s booking engine into a more enterprise-ready, salon-centric solution. Together, the teams prioritised features like advanced rostering, support for complex service journeys and the ability to apportion a single booking’s revenue across multiple stylists – a non-negotiable in a busy salon environment.
Brauz helped Hairhouse pare a long wish list down to a clear minimum viable product, then iterated weekly over roughly six months, layering in refinements without losing momentum. It’s a cadence more reminiscent of a startup partnership than a traditional vendor relationship, and it shows in the final product.
What the customer feels (and doesn’t see)
Behind the scenes, Brauz connects Hairhouse’s booking, click and collect, find in store, on-demand delivery and ship from store experiences across Shopify and NetSuite. For the customer, the technical complexity disappears; what remains is a journey that simply works.
Today, a typical Hairhouse customer can discover a service or product online, book an appointment in a few clicks, receive SMS or email reminders and then arrive in the store confident their booking, deposit and preferences are all in the system. Staff are free to focus on service, not systems, because they know bookings and payments will flow smoothly through POS and their contribution will be recognised in internal reporting.
Stock gaps are no longer a dead end. If a store has two of the three products a customer wants, Brauz allows staff to see real-time options to complete the order via ship from store or on-demand delivery. “Having that ability… to be able to say, I’ve only got two of these here, but the third one I can have store-to-door for you by tomorrow morning or even this afternoon with same-day delivery, that’s magical for a customer,” Murray said. “They came in, they had a problem, you solved all their problems. The stuff’s on its way. They don’t have to go and talk to a competitor.”
It’s a subtle shift, but in a segment where repeat purchases are easily captured online by pure-play competitors, these kinds of experiences build loyalty and protect market share.
Removing the bottleneck and rewiring how tech leads
Underpinning all of this is a deeper organisational change: Brauz has helped remove the technology team as the default bottleneck for incremental innovation. “In many businesses, and Hairhouse is no exception, pretty much any request in some way touches the tech team,” Murray said. “By simplifying the systems and having a really good partner solution like the Brauz solutions, you just take that workload and bottleneck out of the business.”
Instead of triaging small changes to routing rules or promotional logic, Hairhouse’s technology group can focus on strategic initiatives – the unique pieces only they can deliver. Everyday optimisation now lives with ecommerce, retail and marketing, who can “hustle to their hearts’ content” inside Brauz’s configurable tools.
For Murray, that’s where Brauz’s value ultimately sits – not just in the feature set, but in the way the company shows up as a partner. “At this stage of my career, the partnership is almost more valuable,” he reflected.
Finding the right partner is so critical… Brauz was very happy to say, ‘this is a big opportunity for us, we’ll partner with you and build this together’.Scott Murray, Head of Technology, Hairhouse
The relationship is ongoing and deliberately two-way. Brauz regularly brings ideas and patterns from other retailers back to Hairhouse, while Hairhouse continues to challenge Brauz to adapt its platform to the realities of franchising, service and specialty retail. The effect is an omnichannel ecosystem that feels closer to a living, evolving product than a fixed implementation.
For a brand like Hairhouse, where experience is as central as merchandise, that kind of agility – and the ability to move on it without waiting in the dev queue – is fast becoming a competitive necessity rather than a nice-to-have.
The benefit, a key benefit there of moving to Brauz is all those rules are configurable in the user interface…Our ecommerce teams, our retail and marketing teams, they can administer that system without us having to come and change code all the time.Scott Murray, Head of Technology, Hairhouse
