2026 Franchise Overall Winner, Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa

This year, the Franchise Innovation Awards introduced a new Overall Winner category, and Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa earned the inaugural honor. The brand impressed judges across multiple categories, winning awards for Most Innovative Use of Customer-Facing Digital Tools and Most Innovative Employee Recruiting.

Hand & Stone created a new guest booking platform that incorporated existing infrastructure while activating personalized email engagement based on customer behavior and preferences. It consolidated individual location microsites into a central website, leading to a stronger online search presence. The new system has helped optimize Hand & Stone’s booking flow, efficiency, and user experience, resulting in increased revenue and organic website traffic.

Looking to increase the speed of its hiring process, Hand & Stone sought to modernize recruitment through conversational AI and automation. This innovation allowed applicants to move from submission to a scheduled interview in near real time by answering prescreening questions and offering interview slots through direct calendar integration. Nearly 300 locations have implemented the automation program. Across several key metrics, the system has effectively cut hiring timelines in half.

We caught up with two Hand & Stone executives about the thinking behind both innovations, the early results they’ve delivered, and the impact they’re having on customers, employees, and franchisees.

Most Innovative Use of Customer-Facing Digital Tools:
Siddharth Desai, Chief Digital & Technology Officer

Briefly describe Hand & Stone’s new customer online booking platform. Rather than fixing one piece at a time, we redesigned the entire digital guest journey as a single, connected system. We consolidated hundreds of individual location microsites into one unified website with a standardized structure, which concentrated our SEO authority and made the experience consistent from a guest’s very first search.

Once on the site, we built a custom booking flow layered onto our existing technology, so we control the customer experience while preserving operational continuity across every franchise location. Service selection, enhancements, and scheduling are presented the way guests naturally think about wellness services. Recommendations and timing suggestions encourage upgrades and completed bookings.

We then added centralized CRM infrastructure that drives personalized email engagement, guiding guests into relevant booking pathways based on their own behavior and preferences.

How long did it take to plan, create, and launch? We approached this as a phased rollout, which let us refine the experience as real performance data came in. The personalized email engagement layer first went live in March 2025, and the redesigned digital booking experience launched in July of that year. Building in phases was intentional. Early results helped us optimize the booking flow, communication timing, and overall user experience. This way, our decisions were grounded in actual guest behavior rather than assumptions.

What were the main results, impacts, successes, and ROI? We’ve delivered measurable revenue and conversion improvement across the system. On the booking experience itself, since the July 2025 launch, we’ve seen a 25% increase in revenue per user entering the booking flow, a 15% increase in revenue per booking, and a 9% higher booking conversion rate.

Our personalized, behavior-driven email campaigns generated a 16% lift in digital appointment sales compared to prior control periods. In terms of discoverability, the unified site architecture and SEO strategy produced significant gains for us. Organic search traffic grew 241% year over year in July 2025 and 339% year over year in November 2025. Total monthly traffic growth reached as high as 190% in November. Because each layer reinforces the others, the impact of this initiative compounds: Better discoverability feeds the booking experience, which feeds reengagement, which ultimately drives revenue.

How did this platform benefit your customers? It simplified it for them. The experience is far smoother and more relevant than it used to be. Previously, guests were landing on inconsistent microsites and often had to book by phone. They received generic communications that ignored their preferences and appointment history. Now, guests can find us more easily, move through a booking flow designed around how they actually think about wellness services, and receive personalized recommendations and timing suggestions that make it easier to select a service. The personalized email engagement means the communication they receive is genuinely relevant to them rather than one-size-fits-all.

How gratifying is it for a brand when a campaign not only meets your objectives but also far exceeds your expectations with its success? It’s huge, especially because we set out to do something harder than a simple technology rollout. Our goal was a true customer growth strategy with marketing and technology aligned from the very beginning. Seeing results like a 339% year-over-year jump in organic search traffic and a 25% increase in revenue per user tells us that the integrated strategy was the right approach. When the outcomes exceed what you projected, it’s validation, and it gives us a strong foundation to keep building upon.

Most Innovative Employee Recruiting:
Lisa Rossmann, Chief Corporate Spas and Innovation Officer

Briefly describe Hand & Stone’s new employee recruiting platform. We set out to streamline hiring across the system and help franchisees secure top talent faster by eliminating bottlenecks in the recruitment process without increasing the administrative workload. To do that, we layered conversational AI and automation onto the recruitment tools our franchisees already use. Now, when a candidate submits an application, they receive outreach within minutes rather than days.

Each franchise owner determines a set of criteria, and automated prescreening instantly qualifies or disqualifies applicants against that. Qualified candidates are then offered real-time interview slots through direct calendar integration.

The result is a workflow that moves a candidate from submitting an application to a scheduled interview almost in real time while maintaining human connection for the final interviews and hiring decisions.

What were the original goals and objectives in launching the campaign? Hand & Stone operates in a highly competitive, labor-dependent industry where speed to hire directly affects revenue. Every unfilled licensed massage therapist or aesthetician position limits our booking capacity, which limits growth.

In this industry, it’s common for people to apply to several employers at once, and whoever responds first often wins that hire. Historically, our average time to contact a candidate was six days, time to interview exceeded five days, and time to hire averaged more than 26 days. These delays were costing us strong applicants and potential revenue. Our objective was to eliminate those bottlenecks by enabling near-immediate applicant engagement, speeding up interview scheduling, raising interview conversion, and meaningfully reducing time to hire across the system.

What kind of technology is involved with this service? This innovation integrates conversational AI and automation into our existing recruitment platforms, CareerPlug and Paradox. Conversational AI handles immediate candidate outreach and automated prescreening, and the direct calendar integration lets qualified candidates self-schedule interviews in real time, which eliminates the back-and-forth communication. What’s key is that this technology streamlines and speeds up the process rather than replacing the human element. It removes administrative delays so our teams can focus on the relationship-driven parts of hiring.

What was the impact on employment applicants to Hand & Stone? The biggest impact was time. Instead of waiting days to hear back, candidates are engaging within minutes of applying. That immediacy completely changed our conversion rates. Locations using manual outreach converted an average of 16% of applicants to interviews, and locations using conversational AI automation converted 69%.

What was the impact on your franchisees? For our franchisees, the impact has been positive for operations and finances. Across the system, comparing December 2024 to December 2025, we cut our hiring timelines in half. Time to contact dropped from 6.0 days to 1.17 days, time to interview from 5.15 days to 1.38 days, and time to hire from 26.28 days to 12.71 days.

Faster hiring directly protects revenue by minimizing unfilled appointment slots and shrinking the gap between turnover and replacement. We also saw a reinforcing benefit in that locations actively engaging candidates through the system gained increased visibility on Indeed’s job board, which strengthened applicant flow even more. To date, nearly 300 locations have adopted the program, and it has measurably strengthened our franchisees’ ability to compete for licensed talent.