04 April 2026 · 6 minute read · by Zaki Hassan, co-founder
When we opened the first PeakLyft shop in Bangsar in April 2014, we were told within the first month that we needed an app. An app for bookings, an app for queue numbers, an app to remind people they had an appointment, an app to upsell them on the way out. We were told this by a friend who later went on to build exactly that app for someone else, and to be fair to him, he built it well.
We didn't build the app. Twelve years and a global pandemic later, none of the twelve PeakLyft chairs in Klang Valley take a single booking. And the quiet, embarrassing truth is that the queues are shorter now than they were when half the city was trying to book a chair two weeks ahead.
The booking system was solving the wrong problem
For most of the 2010s, Kuala Lumpur's grooming scene rebuilt itself around a Western premium-barber template. Booking apps, named master barbers, individual booking links you could screenshot to your friends. The model was lifted, more or less, from East London and Brooklyn, and it worked for about six years.
What it actually did, though, was solve the wrong problem. The thing customers disliked about old-school walk-in barbers wasn't the walking in. It was the unpredictability of the wait. A booking system fixed that, sort of — but at the cost of an even bigger one. Once your name was in the calendar, you had to plan around it. And when you arrived, the chair was occupied, because the barber had over-run on the booking before yours.
We started hearing, in 2019 and 2020, customers tell us they were keeping their PeakLyft visits as the spontaneous option specifically because we didn't take bookings. They came in on the way home from the dentist. They came in twenty minutes before a job interview. They came in because their wedding photographer had moved the date forward by four hours.
What changed during COVID
The pandemic accelerated everything. When the MCO lifted in mid-2020, the booking-only shops in Bangsar and Mont Kiara struggled to recover their old flow because nobody was planning anything anymore. Nobody was sure they wouldn't be MCO'd again next Tuesday. The whole notion of booking a fortnight ahead briefly stopped making sense to anyone.
What people did do, after 2020, was treat going out as a small reward. They wanted to step out, walk somewhere nice, sit down, get something useful done, and be home in an hour. That's the walk-in barber model almost exactly.
The trend has held. In the trailing three months we measured, walk-in visits to the PeakLyft floor are up nineteen percent year-on-year. Wait times are down. Average chair time, importantly, is also down — because the floor isn't being interrupted by phone calls confirming bookings for tomorrow.
Why this isn't going back
The deeper shift, I think, is that customers have stopped associating "booking" with "premium". Booking, they now realise, is just a way for the business to manage its capacity, not yours. A walk-in shop with a live queue counter at the door is, in many ways, the more respectful model: it tells you the truth about your wait, lets you walk away, and doesn't charge you a no-show fee.
The risk for us, the operators, is that we now have to keep the wait honest. That has meant adding chairs faster, hiring more master barbers, and being ruthless about not letting the floor get oversold. We have turned down two franchise enquiries this year specifically because we couldn't staff the chairs properly.
But that, in the end, is the deal. If you're going to ask people to walk in, you owe them an open door and an honest wait. The rest — the chair work, the conversation, the kopi by the bench — those are the easy parts.
Zaki Hassan is co-founder of PeakLyft Grooming Co. and works the chair at the Bangsar Maarof shop on Saturdays.