Vonlix
Vonlix: Building the UK's Go-To Booking Platform for Barbers and Beauty Pros
How Octelis designed and built Vonlix - a teal-branded SaaS booking marketplace for UK salons, barbers, and beauty professionals with 10,000+ bookings.
The Brief
Vonlix came to us with a clear ambition and a messy problem. They were building a booking marketplace for UK barbers, salons, and independent beauty professionals - but the product had no identity, no design system, and a UI that wasn't doing justice to the platform underneath.
Their team had the backend logic sorted. What they needed was a partner who could translate that into something their target audience - busy business owners with very little patience for clunky software - would actually trust and use.
The brief was deceptively simple: make it feel like it was built for them.
What We Built
We started with branding. Vonlix needed a visual language that sat confidently between "professional tool" and "modern lifestyle brand" - something a barber in Digbeth or a nail technician in Manchester could look at and immediately think this gets me.
The answer was a teal and deep green palette - calm, fresh, and distinct from the tired blues dominating the SaaS market. Paired with clean sans-serif typography and a generous use of white space, the brand felt premium without being intimidating.
From there, we designed the full platform UI across three surfaces:
The marketplace listing pages - where customers search for and discover businesses. We prioritised clarity: prominent ratings, real photography slots, and a booking CTA that never got buried. Every business card was designed to load fast and scan even faster.
The business dashboard - where salon owners manage their listings, availability, and bookings. The challenge here was density: professionals need a lot of information at a glance without the screen becoming a wall of data. We solved this with a modular card layout and a sidebar navigation that kept key actions one click away.
The onboarding flow - getting a new business listed in under five minutes. We stripped out every unnecessary step and added inline guidance at the points where drop-off was most likely. Free listing was the hook; a frictionless setup was what made it stick.
What Made the Difference
Vonlix is a two-sided marketplace - it has to win over businesses and customers simultaneously, and the design has to serve both without compromising either. That's a harder brief than it sounds.
What we kept coming back to was the idea of earned trust. Every design decision - the rating display, the photography-first listing cards, the no-friction free listing - was built to reduce the moment of hesitation. Businesses needed to trust the platform before they'd invest time in it. Customers needed to trust the businesses before they'd hand over their card details.
Good UI design in SaaS isn't decoration. It's the product.
Work With Us
If you're building a platform, marketplace, or SaaS product and need a design partner who understands both the business model and the user, we'd like to hear from you.