GC Kuts

Context

Giancarlo Colombo is an independent barber in Smithtown, New York. His business runs on Instagram: people find him there, they judge the work from photos, and then they try to book. That last step is where a lot of independent operators lose people — the link in bio goes somewhere generic, or somewhere slow, or somewhere that asks a phone to render a desktop layout.

So the brief wasn't "a barbershop website." It was: a person is standing on a train platform, they just tapped a link in an Instagram profile, and they have about four seconds of patience. Get them to a booking.

How the deal was structured

Worth stating plainly, because the framing is part of the work: this was a portfolio case study engagement. A deliberately scoped build for a warm contact, exchanged for a testimonial, portfolio rights and a referral rather than a full fee.

That wasn't undercharging — it was pricing to what the engagement was actually worth to me at that moment, which was proof and distribution rather than cash. Scoping it tightly was part of the same decision: a smaller build I could finish well beats a larger one I'd be apologising for.

I'd rather show that reasoning than hide it. Knowing what a project is for before quoting it is most of what separates a sustainable practice from a stressful one.

Constraints

• Mobile is not the primary case, it is effectively the only case. Nearly everyone arrives from a phone, from Instagram, on cellular data.
• The scope was fixed up front and stayed fixed.
• The site had to be something Giancarlo could point at from a bio link without explanation. No onboarding, no "scroll down to find the button."

Approach and key decisions

Design the path, then the pages

I started from the single action that matters — book — and worked backwards. The booking route is reachable from the first screen without scrolling, and it stays reachable as you move down the page. Everything else on the site exists to answer the questions someone asks before they commit: what does the work look like, where is it, when is he open.

Nothing on the site competes with that one action. There's no newsletter, no promotional interstitial, no second call-to-action fighting the first for attention.

Treat speed as part of the design, not a follow-up task

On cellular, from a social app's in-app browser, a heavy page doesn't feel slow — it feels broken, and people leave before they've formed an opinion about the haircuts. Static rendering, images sized for the layout they land in, and no client-side JavaScript doing work the server already did.

This is the argument I make to every service business: your site's speed is part of your first impression, in the same way the shop being clean is.

Instagram is the top of the funnel, not a competitor

The site links out to Instagram rather than trying to replicate a feed inside itself. The photos live where he already posts them and where they're already maintained. Embedding a feed would have meant a third-party script, a slower page, and a second place for content to go stale.

Outcome

Live and mobile-first, doing the one job it was scoped to do. Booking is moving from link-in-bio to the site itself through a Booksy integration that is in its final hookup — so as of writing, that path is in progress rather than finished, and this page will say so until it isn't.

What's next

Finish the booking integration, then measure it. Booking clicks are the number that would make this case study concrete, and unlike traffic, it's a figure that maps directly onto whether the site earned its keep.