I was at a baseball game last week when the walk-up music situation turned into its own event. Someone needed to play a song off Apple Music through the stadium speaker, except the speaker wouldn’t recognize the phone. So, someone else had to step in to connect it — except that person didn’t have Apple Music, so now the song had to be saved and handed off to play from a totally different streaming app. By the time the music actually played, four people and three devices had been involved in something that should have taken one tap.
And I just kept thinking: in 1995, this would’ve been one motion. Pop the CD in. Hit play. Done.
That’s the thought that wouldn’t leave me alone. Not “technology is bad,” because obviously it isn’t. It’s “when did we agree that more steps mean more advanced?” Somewhere along the way, complexity started getting mistaken for progress. And once I noticed it at that baseball game, I couldn’t stop noticing it everywhere — including in the tools we hand to our stylists, estheticians, and front desk staff every single day.
The CD Player Test
Here’s a simple way to think about it. A CD player had one job, and it did that job without asking you to remember anything. No login. No “which account is this.” No syncing, no compatibility check, no second device because the first one didn’t talk to the speaker. You dropped the disc in, you pushed play, and the song started.
That’s not nostalgia talking. That’s a design standard. And it’s worth asking: does your software pass the CD player test? When a stylist clocks in on a Saturday morning with a full book and zero patience for a glitch, can they get to work as easily as someone in 1995 could push play?
For a lot of salon software, the honest answer is no. And that gap — between how simple work should feel and how complicated it’s become — is exactly what’s costing salons time, money, and good employees.
Why This Keeps Happening
It’s not that anyone set out to make things harder. It’s that “add more features” quietly turned into the goal, instead of “make the job easier.” Every new integration, every extra login, every additional screen got justified on its own. Nobody zoomed out to ask what all those additions were doing to the person trying to check someone out at 6:45 on a Friday with a line forming behind them — or to the person standing at a baseball game just trying to get a song to play.
The result is a generation of software that’s powerful on a spec sheet and exhausting in real life. Multiple passwords. Settings buried four menus deep. A “quick” task that takes six clicks, or three devices, because nobody timed it from the user’s chair.
Powerful. Simple. Loved.
This is the question Rosy Salon Software was built around: what would it look like if a system treated “simple” as the feature, not the afterthought?
Powerful, because a salon’s back end has real complexity to handle — booking, checkout, rebooking, inventory, payroll, the whole business. Rosy doesn’t pretend that complexity isn’t there. Simple, because none of that complexity should land on the person standing at the front desk with a line forming. One login. One place to look. Nothing that makes a new hire feel like they need a manual to ring up a haircut. And loved, because when software actually respects your time, people don’t just tolerate it — they come to rely on it without thinking twice.
That’s the whole idea: all the power, none of the friction.
Push Play
The walk-up music eventually played. It worked fine once it worked. But the friction stuck with me, because that’s the same friction salon owners describe when they talk about the back end of their business — software that can do everything, but makes you fight for the simple stuff.
You shouldn’t have to fight your tools to get through a Tuesday. The goal isn’t to go back to 1995. It’s to bring that one good thing forward: when the tool is right, you don’t think about the tool at all. You just push play.
About the author:
Lori Obiedzinski is a licensed stylist, former manager for a multi-location salon, and distributor sales manager, and is currently the director of partner relations for Rosy Salon Software and Aura Salonware.
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