Fort Lauderdale entrepreneur launches app to handle finger sizing and nail artistry

Out of necessity, do-it-yourself beauty became a thing during the pandemic, with products and services sprouting to serve up home solutions to salon goers. A young Fort Lauderdale enterprise, Nailstry, was one of those.

Aurelia Edwards founded Nailstry (short for nails and artistry), an app-based fingernail sizing solution that helps customers shop for press-on nails on Nailstry’s curated marketplace. She hatched her concept before the pandemic.

As a longtime massage therapist, Edwards had to keep her nails short for her trade, but when she went to parties she used press-on nails and thought it should be easier to size her nails and buy press-on nails and nail art online. To test her concept, pre-pandemic she ran a physical press-on nail popup shop in New York City, where customers could get sized for nails and buy the nail artistry of featured designers.

“We did a few shopping events and some social media advertising and it went viral. We had a lot of interest from people outside the New York City area,” Edwards said. “The next step was creating a digital sizing solution because sizing manually wasn’t efficient. And then we piggybacked on that with the digital marketplace.”

At the start of 2020, Edwards retired from massage, moved to South Florida, and went all-in on Nailstry (nailstry.com). The pandemic brought a sales boom in press-on nails, as well as nail stickers and gel manicures. The company was selected the second runner-up in the Florida International University track of the 2022 Miami Herald Startup Pitch Competition.

“What we’re building utilizes computer vision and AI, there’s a big tech component to it, and we made a lot of traction that year,” she said. “We were even recognized by Apple and invited to their entrepreneur camp to continue building our technology.”

Through their customers’ camera phones, Nailstry’s technology measures the users’ fingernail widths and curvature to determine their sizes and stores that in their app profiles so they can shop at Nailstry’s digital marketplace. “The idea is to simplify that shopping experience,” Edwards said.

To date, Nailstry has more than 3,000 users and features about 300 nail designers. For now, the startup makes money through a percentage of marketplace sales, but the plan is to move into the business-to-business arena and license this technology to bigger brands.

Edwards has been bootstrapping using personal savings, has received about $90,000 in grants, and is seeking venture funding. She has a chief technology officer and works with tech teams in Ukraine and Brazil.

What’s next? Nailstry is building version No. 2 of its tech and is working on a feature to allow customers to try on their nails through augmented reality before they buy.

This story was originally published May 8, 2022 at 6:00 AM.