Ray Studios: omnichannel payments across France, Spain and Belgium - shipped in a week

Ray Studios is a fast-growing tattoo-removal business operating across multiple European markets. Headquartered in Paris, the team had recently expanded into Spain and Belgium, and needed a payment platform that could handle the realities of in-clinic, online and remote payments across all three countries - on a single Stripe account, with a single set of dashboards.

The hardest constraint was regulatory rather than technical. In France, tattoo removal is classified as a medical procedure, which means clinics have to split payments between the doctor and the supporting staff at the moment of capture rather than reconciling after the fact. A generic "take payment, sort it out later" approach wouldn't comply, and any solution that introduced complexity into the front-of-house workflow would slow the team down at exactly the wrong moment in the customer journey.

Ray Studios also wanted a graceful answer to the messier real-world cases: customers who turn up without a card, customers who need to pay remotely, and a steady stream of no-show appointments where the studio had blocked time but received no revenue. The brief was a payment stack that handled the routine and the exceptions, across three countries, with as little process change for the team as possible.

We deployed Stripe Payments and Stripe Terminal across all three markets within a single working week. The team trained on the Terminal hardware and the Stripe dashboard reporting in parallel with deployment, so by the time the first clinic was live the floor staff had the same operational confidence as a long-running setup.

To handle the French regulatory requirement, we configured payment splitting at source so that every transaction routes the doctor's portion and the studio's portion correctly at the point of capture. Reconciliation is now a structured export rather than a manual matching exercise, and the audit trail is clean for any compliance review.

For the harder cases - forgotten cards, remote payments, no-shows - we extended the application using Stripe's low-code Payment Links primitives. Two to three additional days of work gave the team the ability to generate a tailored payment link for any customer or scenario, branded to Ray Studios, sent over the channel that suits them. No-show appointments became a soft revenue line rather than a cost centre.

Within a month of go-live, omnichannel payments were saving the team approximately two working days per month - time that had previously been absorbed by manual reconciliation, follow-ups for missed payments and the operational overhead of three disjointed payment flows. That time now goes back into customer-facing work.

Compliance is structurally handled. Payment splitting at source removes an entire class of bookkeeping risk on the French operation, and the same Stripe account scales naturally as Spain and Belgium pick up volume. The flexible payment-link extension has lifted retention on the customer journey - the team can re-engage customers who would previously have slipped through the cracks - and it has also generated incremental revenue from no-show fees that would otherwise have been written off.

Square1 is the world's first verified Stripe Partner agency, with Specialised Partner status across Payments and Billing. We bring particular depth in fast, regulation-aware Stripe rollouts across Europe - combining Hands-on-Keyboard delivery with the operational training and Advisory work clients need to run the platform themselves once we're done.