It's Hot. It's Cold.
It's Barelegs Sauna
How it started
Barelegs started with my wife Kayleigh, who hated saunas, me not taking no for an answer, and a wedding in Sweden.
Kayleigh came home from that trip converted for life. She had the idea and the know-how. I took on everything needed to turn it into a business people could find and book: the name, the look, the website and the systems behind it.
I'm upfront that it's mine. It's also a good example of what I do when nobody's handing me a brief, and it's work I really enjoyed.
The brief that wasn't a brief
There was no deck and no brand guidelines. Just Kayleigh's knowledge of contrast therapy and her sense of what makes people feel welcome.
The job was turning a feeling (hot room, cold plunge, a laugh with a stranger on the bench) into something people could find on Google and trust enough to book.
The Build
A sauna business lives or dies on whether people can book without any hassle. So I built the site around a custom booking system with customer logins. Locals can make an account, see what's free and book a spot without a phone call or an email back and forth.
Plenty of people arrive nervous about their first sauna, so the site answers their questions before they have to ask. The navigation, the photos and the path from the homepage to booking were all planned with that person in mind.
I wrote the SEO by hand around what people in Northland actually search for, rather than using a template. It's still early days, but it's building month on month.
Keeping it welcoming
Sauna is still new to a lot of New Zealanders. Some find it intimidating, and plenty just don't know what to expect. Barelegs is for everyone, not only the wellness crowd, so the site and the socials explain things gently: the etiquette, the benefits, and what happens when you walk in.
Kayleigh runs the socials, and we make the content together. It sounds like her: warm, a bit cheeky and very local.
So far
Barelegs is still early in its story, but the name, brand, booking system, SEO and socials are all built to grow with it.