OpenEmilio’s
Barber Shop
Case study — Excelsior, San Francisco
Client
Emilio's Barber Shop
Where
Excelsior, San Francisco
Booking
Booksy · 5.0★
Status
Live
The brief
A neighborhood shop whose website had gone dark.
Emilio's has cut hair on Mission Street for years — a teal storefront with a hand-painted sign, a 5.0 on Booksy, a shop dog named Bella. But their old web address had lapsed and gone dead. Search for them and you found nothing. The work was there; the lights weren't.
So the site had to feel like walking up to the shop after dark — neon on, pole turning, door open. Warm and real, not a template. Every path leads to the same place: their Booksy chair, one tap away.
5734 Mission St · the same shop, by day
What was built
A storefront that breathes
The hero is the shop itself — the real teal wall, the hand-painted script, Emilio in the doorway — as a living cinemagraph. The pole turns and the light shifts while the page holds still. Poster-first and under half a megabyte, so it opens instantly on a phone at the bus stop.
A board that deals the menu
Fifteen services on a split-flap Solari board that flips like an old departures sign — “NOW SERVING,” a ticket counter, prices in barber-chair red. It deals as you scroll into it and keeps a lazy idle cycle, so the price list feels like a place, not a spreadsheet.
A sign that's never wrong
The OPEN / CLOSED tube reads the real clock in San Francisco against the shop's hours — lit when they're cutting, dark when they're not, “by appt” on Sundays. Hours live in one place and rewrite the sign, the visit list, and the search-engine data at once.
Proof on 35mm
Fresh Cuts is a contact sheet of real work that scrubs sideways as you scroll down — sixteen frames of fades and line-ups, one keeper ringed in grease pencil. It's the barbershop's portfolio, framed like film instead of a grid.
“Their address had gone dark. Now the whole block can find them again.”
Your shop deserves its lights on too.
A free homepage preview costs you one email and zero meetings.