Hair and beauty salon chain lookfantastic has outsourced its email platform to Cobweb in an attempt to increase flexibility and scalability.

Lookfantastic is a chain of hair and beauty salons, with 17 outlets around England, a training division and two websites – lookfantastic.com and lookmantastic.com. Since opening its first store in 1978, the company has grown to employ over 400 people and is on track for £16m in revenue for fiscal 2008.

Until 2003, the company’s IT infrastructure was handled in-house by a small team. As the company grew, the infrastructure become less reliable and was not able to cope with the increasing number of workers.

Daniel Crown, CEO at lookfantastic, said: “With such rapid growth, it was inevitable that we were going to experience growing pains. Our ‘pains’ were with our IT infrastructure; it was becoming expensive to run, impossible to update and slow to expand. Most importantly, it was incredibly time consuming and resource-hungry, which was distracting us from our core business objective of growing the company.”

Having a number of outlets spread across the country was also causing problems for the IT infrastructure. Shared applications and remote devices such as BlackBerrys were also presenting challenges to the company.

After taking the decision to improve its IT infrastructure, lookfantastic initially considered expanding its IT support team and investing in new hardware and software. The company decided this would prove too costly and there was no guarantee it would solve the problem long-term.

Crown said: “Outsourcing all email communication was the only option available that would free up our team and allow us to concentrate on our core business. It would also ensure that we had best of breed technology, a highly secure infrastructure and a solution that can grow as we grew.”

Lookfantastic settled on Microsoft Hosted Exchange Business Email from Cobweb, a managed service that provides email, calendar and contacts access. Compatibility with smartphones has enable lookfantastic to invest in BlackBerrys, meaning employees can access email on-the-go.

The platform also provides data backup, offering business continuity in the event of a disaster. Upgrades and security are also handled by Cobweb, freeing up lookfantastic’s IT staff for other tasks.

The system is also scalable, as pricing is on a per seat basis. This means lookfantastic only has to buy the amount of licences it requires and can add more as the company continues its expansion.