In a typical Lebanese salon, the day still runs on a paper diary. Appointments get penciled in over the phone, a regular client's preferences live in the memory of one stylist, and the till and the booking book never quite agree at closing time. Booklee was built to replace all of that with a single screen.
The Beirut startup makes software for the beauty and wellness industry. Its platform pulls bookings, payments, client management, reminders, and analytics into one dashboard for the business, and pairs it with a consumer app where people can discover salons and book appointments online. The idea is simple: give a salon, spa, or clinic one place to run the whole operation, instead of juggling a notebook, a spreadsheet, a phone, and a cash drawer.
Two Friends Who Saw a Gap Back Home
Booklee was founded by childhood friends Costa Sabbagh and Esper Estephan while they were studying abroad. Living in markets where technology had worked its way into everyday services, they saw how digital tools helped ordinary businesses run more smoothly and treat customers better. Booking a haircut or a treatment with a few taps was normal, not a novelty.
When they looked back at the beauty and wellness industry in Lebanon, they saw something different. Many businesses were still running on paper records, spreadsheets, phone calls, and systems that did not talk to each other. A missed call could mean a missed booking. A double-booking could mean an unhappy client. None of it was the fault of the salon owners; they simply did not have a tool built for how they actually worked.
That gap became the opening. Sabbagh and Estephan set out to build software tailored to the specific needs of the industry, rather than bending a generic booking tool to fit. What started as an idea between two friends turned into Booklee, a company founded in 2024.
One Dashboard Instead of Five Tools
The core of Booklee is the business dashboard. Instead of a paper diary, a salon gets a live calendar of its appointments. Instead of chasing payments by hand, it can take payments through the platform. Instead of trying to remember who is due for a return visit, it has a client record for each customer and automated reminders that cut down on no-shows.
The analytics layer is the part a paper diary can never offer. A salon owner can see which services bring in the most revenue, how busy each part of the week is, and how the business is trending over time. That turns a stack of handwritten notes into numbers an owner can actually act on.
On the other side sits the consumer app, available on the App Store and Google Play, where people can find businesses and book appointments online. For a salon, that means a booking can come in at midnight without anyone answering the phone. For a customer, it means choosing a time and confirming it in a few taps. The two sides feed each other: every business on Booklee becomes discoverable, and every booking flows straight back into the same dashboard the staff already use.
Bringing payments, scheduling, and client records under one roof also closes a gap that disconnected systems tend to leave open. When the booking, the payment, and the customer history all sit in the same place, the numbers reconcile on their own and the day-to-day guesswork shrinks. That is the difference between software that simply takes appointments and a platform a business runs on.
200 Businesses and $1 Million in a Few Months
Booklee launched in January, and the early numbers moved fast. The company has onboarded more than 200 businesses, including several of Lebanon's well-known beauty, wellness, and aesthetic brands. That is a meaningful base in a market where many owners had never used scheduling software before.
The activity behind those accounts is just as telling. The platform has processed over $1 million in transactions and facilitated more than 25,000 bookings. Those are not vanity figures; they are appointments kept and payments collected through the system, in a country where convincing businesses to digitize their core operations is rarely easy.
Booklee has also signed partnerships with major hotel chains, extending its reach beyond standalone salons into the spas and wellness services that hotels run for their guests. Alongside the commercial traction, the company has attracted investor backing, giving it the runway to keep building and expanding rather than slowing down after launch.
Those partnerships and the investor support point in the same direction. A platform that started by signing independent salons is now handling appointments inside larger hospitality operations, where the standards for reliability are higher and the volume is steadier. Each new type of customer is a test the product has had to pass, and so far the pattern has been to keep adding them rather than churning through them.
Why the Founders Think It Works
Booklee's pitch is built around the way these businesses actually operate, not around features for their own sake. The founders frame the company as a daily tool rather than a piece of software a salon logs into once a month.
"We believe beauty and wellness businesses deserve tools that are simple, powerful, and built around the way they actually work," Estephan said. "Our vision is to become the platform they rely on every day to run, grow, and deliver exceptional experiences."
That framing matters in an industry where the average owner is a stylist or therapist first and a software user second. A tool that is hard to learn gets abandoned. A tool that quietly handles the bookings, the payments, and the reminders becomes part of the routine, and that is the position Booklee is trying to hold.
It also explains the speed of the early adoption. Onboarding more than 200 businesses, several of them established beauty, wellness, and aesthetic brands, suggests the product cleared the bar that matters most: owners were willing to move their real operations onto it. Persuading a busy salon to swap a trusted paper diary for a screen is its own kind of proof that the tool earns its place.
Where Booklee Goes Next
The Lebanon launch was the starting point, not the destination. With early traction at home, the company is now focused on scaling its operations and bringing the platform to markets across the GCC, where the beauty and wellness sector is large and spending is high.
Expansion will test whether the playbook that worked in Beirut travels. The bet is that the same problem exists in plenty of places: businesses that run on appointments, money still leaking through paper systems, and owners who would rather cut hair or run treatments than wrestle with admin. Booklee's job is to keep being the screen that makes the rest of it disappear.
See how Booklee works at booklee.app.
Booklee
