Walk-in chains
“Walk-ins welcome” is your promise.Carden helps you keep it, everywhere.
The same welcome everywhere: a ticket at the door, a wait time announced, a text just before it’s their turn. And for head office, the real waiting time and the clients who walked out, site by site. What nobody was measuring.
- Pilot on 1 to 3 salons
- No building work
- Your till stays in place
Ticket no. 24
About 12 min
Text sent
Almost your turn
What happens today
One brand, ten ways of making people wait.
A notebook here, paper tickets there. For clients, the promise depends on which salon they walk into. And head office sees none of it.
- The ones who leave
- Never in the booking system, never through the till: nobody counts them.
- The real wait
- You know Saturday’s takings. Not how long people had to wait.
- How long services take
- The catalogue time is declared. The real one isn’t recorded anywhere.
What head office sees
Four figures, measured the same way at every site.
- Service rate
- Clients served out of clients who came in. The only figure that shows the ones who leave.
- Real waiting time
- The wait people actually had, from ticket to chair. Not the one announced.
- Service duration
- Measured, by site and by team member.
- Hourly footfall
- Peaks repeat themselves: they become predictable.
Multiplied by your prices: what waiting costs, in euros, site by site. Carden data
Montparnasse · Saturday
Example
- 91%
- service rate
- 14 min
- median wait
- 32 min
- peak, at 5 pm
- 6
- clients who walked out
Arrivals per hour
What changes
Fewer walkouts from day one. Better decisions after that.
- Carden does it, from installation
- An accurate wait time, recalculated continuously: people who know they have twenty minutes stay. And a text just before their turn: the client pops out for an errand, the waiting area empties.
- You decide, figures in hand
- Add staff at peak times, adjust service durations in the catalogue, know which site deserves another chair and which needs to organise itself differently.
How it works
Three salons first. The whole network next, if the numbers hold up.
The pilot
One to three salons equipped, no building work.
The measurement
Four to six weeks of real waiting times, footfall and walkouts.
The rollout
You decide on your figures, and roll out site by site.
On the shop floor
The team has nothing to enter. That’s why it holds.
“Carden has revolutionised how we handle our last-minute and walk-in clients. We serve more clients, with a smooth, stress-free experience — for them and for us.”
Do we have to change the network’s till or booking software?+
No. Carden connects read-only to what’s already in place and works on what those tools don’t measure: real waiting time, hourly footfall, clients who leave without being served. No migration, no change of habits on the shop floor.
How does a rollout across 20 salons work?+
Never all at once. We equip 1 to 3 pilot salons, let it run for four to six weeks, and the network decides on the figures recorded — not on a demo. The rollout then goes site by site, with no building work.
Do salon teams need training?+
The team has nothing to enter: the kiosk issues the ticket, the screen shows who’s next. They pick it up at installation. That’s exactly what makes the standard workable across a whole network.
What exactly does head office see?+
Real waiting time and hourly footfall at each site, clients who leave unserved, the actual length of each service — timestamped, not self-reported. Consolidated for the network and broken down site by site, with history.
What if a site in the network also takes appointments?+
That’s the usual case. Carden doesn’t replace the booking system: it runs the walk-in flow alongside it, and for sites that have one it re-offers cancelled slots. Both approaches sit side by side in the same network.
What’s the pricing model for a network?+
Carden Salon costs €109 per site per month, hardware not included — the network buys it and owns it. For a network, pricing is agreed at the pilot stage.
Does your promise hold everywhere?Measure it in three salons.
We equip one to three sites and record real waiting times and walkouts for four to six weeks. Then you decide, on your own numbers.