Squeeze Massage
Siera Holleman, standing with her "third child."
By the sounds of it, Siera Holleman herself could use a good massage.
“I’m running around town marketing this thing like crazy,” she says over the phone. “No one has heard of it because it’s such a new brand.”
She has been, she says, running from place to place and event to event shaking hands, making as many new friends as she can, and creating relationships.
“I am truly hitting the streets,” Holleman says.
“This thing” is Squeeze Massage, a franchise massage concept based in Los Angeles.
Holleman’s franchise is the corporation’s 11th nationwide and first in Fort Worth and Dallas. She has purchased all of the Fort Worth territory with a goal of opening another store at some point in the future.
The first — her “third child” — is in the Foundry District at 2621 Whitmore St. Hours are 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week. Ferran Campbell, a licensed massage therapist, serves as the general manager.
Holleman, 34, a Fort Worth resident living here with her husband Jake and two young children, has opened with 12 massage therapists and seven front-of-house hosts. Her shop consists of eight rooms for massages. She says she is about to bring on six more therapists.
Squeeze Massage is an app-based massage concept created by the founders of hair salon Drybar, Alli Webb and Michael Landau. Its CEO is Brittany Driscoll, Drybar’s former vice president of marketing. Squeeze is disrupting the industry through the customer experience.
“We took a lot of the learnings of building Drybar, creating those sophisticated, luxurious retail experiences with all of the built-in surprise and delight moments, a sophisticated, whimsical brand, and bringing all of that meeting in the middle at an affordable price point,” Driscoll said to Forbes.
A big part of the customer experience revolves around the app. Through the app, customers can book and pay for massages, set personalized preferences, tip, rate, and review the experience. No clipboards with pages to fill out. No waiting around to pay afterward. No needing to call in advance, waiting for someone to answer and then being put on hold.
Paperwork is a buzzkill, make no mistake about it. But losing and wasting time is the one that makes you kick yourself. The app gives the customer complete control.
Massages are $129 for 50 minutes or $159 for 80 minutes, and memberships are offered for $95 or $125 per month. In conjunction with the Fort Worth debut, they're offering anyone who signs up for a monthly membership within 60 days of the grand opening $15 off the regular monthly membership fee.
Holleman’s discovery of Squeeze was in the aftermath, coincidentally, of getting a massage. She was stressed over things at her former company and told her husband she needed a massage. Go to it, he replied.
Squeeze Massage
Siera Holleman instantly fell in love with the branding.
Her experience, she says, was quite typical.
“I don't like showing up and being handed a clipboard,” she says. “I don't like filling everything out right then. I don't really like the experience itself. The massage is typically OK, but then I really don't like standing there in line to leave and four girls are staring at me. One's on the phone with a mad customer, one's trying to sell me skincare, and I'm just trying to get out of there.”
That same night, undoubtedly because an algorithm had picked up what she had been exploring on her phone or tablet, Squeeze Massage appeared on Facebook or Instagram, she can’t recall.
“It was the branding,” she says of what caught her attention. “And I went to the website, which talked about the app and talked about the process and all the things that they've removed. And I looked at Jake [her husband] and I was like, ‘This place, this is exactly where I would go to right now.’”
Holleman’s professional background is in marketing, so, that it caught her eye was not surprising. Brands she has worked with include Dickies and Simpli.fi. Holleman, raised in Mansfield, is a graduate of Baylor.
“I've got about 10 years of marketing, and three years of operations,” Holleman says. “And I kind of decided I was ready to go into my own thing. Going into a franchise has been something that I've thought about for a long time. I interned for a multi-location owner of Sport Clips when I was in college. The seed was kind of planted there with a franchise. And my husband and I had talked about it a lot and we just kind of kept saying, well, what are our options? I really want it to be mine and I really want it to be something that I would be passionate about.”
Her less-than-stellar massage experience coupled with her random discovery of Squeeze were epiphany experiences of sorts.
Family and friends, she says, told the couple they “were crazy” taking the leap, but, Holleman adds, “I think I’ve always been a little bit of a risk-taker, close my eyes and jump” kind of person.
Getting up and running has been about a two-year process, she says. The location and real estate were the top priorities. “I had a vision for the location I would not waver on. I knew immediately that was our space,” she says of the Foundry District location.
At one point Driscoll came to town and “they really held our hand through it. They’ve been great.”
“There's so many positives getting in at the ground floor and I wouldn't change it,” she says. “There have been difficulties, of course. I mean, [she and her husband] looked at each other last week and we were like, ‘Oh, my God, I can't picture doing this again.’ But we will and the second one will be so much easier because we'll know what to expect.”
In the meantime, she knows of a good place for a massage.