The ROI of Emotion: Brand as a Financial Defense

In the worlds of venture capital and high-growth tech, there is often an unspoken rule: emotions are liabilities. Throughout my professional career, no one ever explicitly told me that empathy was a weakness or that I needed to be colder to lead. They didn't have to. The environment spoke for itself. In boardrooms and investment committees, conversations are anchored exclusively in facts, hard numbers, and logic.

Subconsciously, I absorbed this. I convinced myself that to be taken seriously as a female founder in a male-dominated ecosystem, I needed to repress my intuition and operate purely on data. I thought I had to build a machine, not a community.

So, when we built Glitzi, we initially built it with that mindset: efficient, transactional, and fast. We viewed ourselves as a logistics solution for beauty. But we soon hit a wall that Excel couldn't fix.

The Data Paradox

The wake-up call didn't come from a crash, but from a silent leak. While our acquisition numbers were decent, our retention rates were not where they needed to be for a sustainable, world-class consumer business. We dove into the quantitative data to find the "bug," but the numbers were vague and inconclusive.

Simultaneously, I started receiving feedback from other female founders in the B2C space who knew my story and the true inner workings of Glitzi. They kept telling me: "Ana, you are missing the story. You are talking about a service, but you aren't talking about the impact."

I sought advice from branding experts like Valentina Giraldo and Ana Valder. Their diagnosis was unanimous: we had a differentiation problem. To the customer, we were just another app. We lacked a soul. They reminded me that human beings don't connect with efficiency; they connect with emotions, clarity, and trust.

To fix our unit economics, specifically retention and Lifetime Value (LTV), I had to do the one thing I had trained myself not to do: embrace the emotional side of the business.

The Supply Side: The Foundation We Built

The first step was fixing the supply side, and this is where we have made our most significant progress. In the traditional beauty industry, the professional is often treated as a disposable tool to deliver a service.

I recall a conversation with one of our professionals — let’s call her Lucia — that shook me. Before Glitzi, Lucia worked at a nail bar "island" in a shopping mall. She worked from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., often without breaks. She told me that during the peak December season, the demand was so high that she wasn't allowed to stop to eat. Someone from the staff would literally feed her while she continued filing a client's nails. She had a young child she barely saw.

Lucia joined Glitzi and her life changed. She regained ownership of her time. She could schedule work around her child’s needs, not the other way around. And financially, she was earning three to four times more than she did at the mall.

We have successfully built a brand that offers flexibility and dignity. We treat professionals as partners, not just workers. In return, we have secured their loyalty. We solved the supply side by leading with humanity.

The Demand Side: The Current Frontier

Now, our challenge is the consumer. In Latin America, our main competitor is not another app; it is the traditional salon and spa industry.

For a long time, we tried to compete on convenience ("we save you time") and security ("we are safer than a stranger"). While our security protocols are robust, including background checks, real-time monitoring from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., and panic buttons, we realized that safety is just the baseline. It allows us to play the game, but it doesn't win the heart.

To truly win market share from traditional salons, we are now shifting our strategy to tell the "Why."

A transactional customer chooses a salon because it's a habit. A loyal customer chooses Glitzi because of the impact. We are working on bridging the gap between the client and the professional. We want the customer to know that by booking a massage or a manicure, they aren't just buying a service; they are directly empowering a woman like Lucia to be independent, to be a present mother, and to earn a fair income.

The "cold" approach was hiding this story. The "emotional" approach is putting it front and center. We are betting that the modern consumer wants to be part of that story.

The Financial Result

Pivoting to an emotional brand strategy is not a "soft" move. It is a hard financial correction that is already bearing fruit, though we are still on the journey.

By beginning to tell these stories and selling purpose rather than just convenience, we are seeing the early indicators of success. Since shifting our focus toward brand and emotion, we have seen a 5 to 10 percentage point increase in client retention.

We are not at the finish line yet, but the trajectory is clear. Today, Glitzi is unit-economic positive and profitable.

The Lesson for Founders

In the current "Tech Winter," where investors are demanding profitability over growth at all costs, it is easy to think we need to be more ruthless. But my journey with Glitzi taught me the opposite.

To fix the numbers, I had to look beyond them. I had to unlearn the "cold" behavior I adopted from the finance world and lean into empathy.

For founders, especially women trying to fit into a mold: don't suppress your intuition. Data tells you what is happening, but emotion tells you why. And in the business of serving humans, the "why" is the only thing that builds a company that lasts.