How HiBob Supports Fresha’s High-Performance Growth
Scaling is impossible for any business without exceptional talent and strategic infrastructure. That’s certainly true of global beauty and wellness brand Fresha, which has transformed its approach to people, culture and talent in order to support rapid global growth in recent years.
HiBob, the AI-powered, automated HR, payroll and finance platform has played a critical role in supporting this growth. While Fresha’s renewed approach to its people has driven performance and established talent as a core strategic advantage, the pace of change also revealed fragmentation, lack of leadership visibility over processes and an over-reliance on manual processes.
“We support companies that are at inflexion points when it comes to growth,” says HiBob’s Senior Account Manager Edward Tyers. “When a company like Fresha is scaling at pace, it can introduce structural complexity with core pressure points around fragmentation, risk exposure, operational inefficiencies and disconnected performance and processes.”
“Scaling itself isn’t the issue,” says Edward. “It’s scaling without unified infrastructure, which is what HiBob offers. We aren’t just an HR platform, but the operational backbone that helps the likes of Fresha enter new markets, grow rapidly, standardise their people and talent processes and enable expansion across geographies.”
Enabling growth at Fresha
Fresha’s global teams, spread across locations including London, Madrid, Paris, the Netherlands, the US, Canada and Asia, are surging in numbers. HiBob provides a crucial strategic infrastructure layer that enables a data-driven single source of truth across this entire operation.
“We give them consistency and clarity across markets while still enabling local flexibility,” Edward explains. “The single source of truth for people data we provide gives leadership real-time visibility into areas like headcount, structure and cost that’s crucial when it comes to investing in expansion.”
Other key areas where HiBob has supported Fresha include in standardising core workflows from onboarding to compensation cycles – crucial for managers to operate consistently across geographies, supporting payroll integration, operational alignment and by greater accuracy in data and reporting.
“For Fresha, the outcome was never just about operations or improving administrative efficiency, which is why it’s so good working with them,” says Edward. “It was about leadership confidence – when data is clean, processes are structured and reporting is centralised, expansion becomes more controlled and predictable. That’s where HiBob makes the real difference.”
Enabling strategic ambition
HiBob brings advantages to partners through centralisation, standardisation, faster reporting and real-time insight, as well as its automation capabilities. These, says Edward, are critical for bringing efficiencies to operational load.
“We automate onboarding workflows, approvals, compensation cycles, reporting and more, all of which reduces dependency on spreadsheets and manual reconciliation,” he explains. “For senior leaders that visibility is invaluable.”
“In terms of automation, if you look at organisational performance, we also leverage AI capabilities to harness key performance data,” Edward says. “This means leaders like Sharee and Kiran at Fresha can very quickly access and harness it to inform strategic decision making. That level of transparency is what enables confident expansion rather than reactive management.”
Key to this success is the close collaboration that both Fresha and HiBob have fostered. Edward explains that, to HiBob, real, measurable partnerships are critical to successful outcomes. “It’s the thing we do really well,” he explains. “We work with our customers day and night to understand their goals, share their vision and ambitions and create a tangible support plan for every phase of the journey.”
“Fresha is expanding, and we are ready to support them in scaling with greater structure and discipline. As growth continues, focus will shift to operational maturity – governance, visibility and workforce planning - to ensure people and infrastructure are an enabler of ambition.”
