After 20 years in beauty,building a salon featured in Women's Wear Daily, leading operations at MAC Cosmetics—here's what I learned about what beauty actually needs.

Beauty is one of the biggest consumer industries in the world, yet the way most people experience it is still stuck in an outdated model. You can buy anything in two clicks, track a delivery in real time, and get personalized recommendations for everything from music to medicine. But when it comes to beauty services and expertise, the experience is often inconsistent, unclear, and disconnected from the realities of real people, real schedules, and real faces.

That disconnect is the problem I build for.

I’m Chardé Smith, founder of Triple Eight Creative, a tech-forward beauty studio built at the intersection of artistry, hospitality, and digital experience. I’ve spent years in the industry learning what actually makes someone trust a beauty professional and return. It is not just talent. It is not just brand polish. It is how the experience feels from the first touchpoint to the final look. It is what happens before, during, and after the appointment. It is whether someone feels seen, understood, and supported, especially people who are routinely underserved in beauty, including Black women and culturally diverse clients.

New York taught me something that changed how I think about service. People here do not want speed for the sake of speed.

They want ease that signals respect.

They want a process that feels considered and the friction removed before they ever have to ask. That mindset applies perfectly to beauty, because beauty is intimate. It’s not just aesthetic. It’s your identity and, most of the time, the source of your confidence.

The industry has tried to solve the friction in pieces. Retail offers access to products, but often without personalization or real education. On-demand services offer convenience, but not always trust or consistency. Independent artists deliver incredible work, but are frequently operating without the digital infrastructure that makes an experience repeatable and scalable. The gap is not a lack of talent. The gap is a lack of systems.

Technology is not the opposite of human connection. When used correctly, it protects it.

What I build at Triple Eight Creative is an experience model in which technology supports the most human aspects of beauty. Data is not collected to be clever. It is collected to make someone feel cared for. Digital touchpoints are not used to automate people out of the process. They are used to make the process easier to enter, understand, and trust.

That looks like structured onboarding that captures what clients actually need, not just what they think they want. It looks like a Signature Glam framework that reduces decision fatigue and gives clients language for their own preferences. It looks like an editorial layer that educates and sets expectations before someone ever books. It looks like a community built around consistent guidance, not constant selling. It looks like hospitality integrations that treat beauty as a guest experience rather than an afterthought. It looks like backend clarity, so service delivery stays reliable. It looks like a modern brand and web design that helps beauty professionals show up digitally with the same confidence they bring in person.

This is what changes how people interact with beauty. The future of high-touch industries is not less human. It’s more intentional.

High-touch becomes scalable when the infrastructure is designed with care. In beauty, that matters even more because people are not just purchasing a service. They are placing trust in someone during a vulnerable, personal moment. If the experience is confusing, rushed, or inconsistent, trust breaks down. If the experience is clear, personalized, and reliable, trust compounds.

This is why I don’t describe my work as “services.” I describe it as an ecosystem.

Triple Eight Creative is not a single offering. It is an approach to beauty that treats experience as the product and technology as the support system. My goal is not to make beauty faster. My goal is to make beauty feel safer, smarter, and more personal.

Beauty does not need another trend cycle. It needs a new standard.

And that standard has to include the people beauty has historically ignored. It has to include the nuance of undertones, the reality of textured hair, and the truth that not everyone feels confident walking into a traditional retail counter and being told what to buy. It has to include clients who want both expertise and ease. It has to reflect modern expectations, because consumers have already evolved. The industry needs to catch up.

I’m building that bridge.

I’m building the systems that make high-touch beauty feel seamless and an infrastructure that turns care into consistency.

Triple Eight Creative is a modern experience that lets people interact with beauty the way they already interact with everything else: clarity because beauty is confusing, confidence because we take time and use data to learn what you need, and trust because we lead with being the expert but listen to what you're asking for to ensure you get exactly what you need.

That is what it means to be a beauty-tech founder.

Want to know where to start? Take our Signature Glam Test, and we will guide you through the rest.