A hairdressing academy that runs like Netflix.

The Challenge

Connected Hair Academy, Poland's largest online education platform for hairdressers, ran on WordPress: a sprawling stack of plugins for memberships, payments and video, a site getting slower by the month, and an interface that couldn't keep pace with how fast the product was growing. The goal: a streaming-service feel, full control over payments and data, and zero downtime for existing members.

A catalog that feels like Netflix

Members browse courses the way they browse a streaming service: themed rows, hover-to-preview on every tile, a hero banner for new releases. Every course and every educator gets its own public page that works for SEO and sells access.

• Rows for new releases, featured picks, most watched, and technique categories
• Course pages with a results gallery, chapters and a video preview
• Educator pages with a bio and their full course list
• Continue Watching, My List and ratings, Netflix-style

Academy, course catalog

Accounts, plans and payments

No passwords: sign in with a link or a code sent by email. Subscription plans, single-course access and time-limited access all run through one system. Payments run on Stripe: checkout, invoices and a client portal. We designed the subscription migration so existing customers moved to the new system without re-entering a single card.

Course pages built to sell access

Every course gets a rich public page: a hero with a video preview, a results gallery, chapters with thumbnails and running times, and a ‘what you’ll learn’ section. All of it is visible to logged-out visitors, because that's what drives sales. Only members with active access can actually play the videos: every clip sits behind signed, expiring tokens.

Course page, chapters

Search and an AI assistant

Search indexes what educators actually say in the courses, not just titles. It understands intent and jumps straight to the exact minute of the exact lesson. On top of that, the Ask the Academy assistant answers questions using course material only and cites its sources, each one a click away from the right moment in the player.

Search across course content

A content panel for the owner

Courses, educators, blog, quizzes and certificates live in one panel (Payload CMS). Publishing a change automatically rebuilds and redeploys the site, no developer required.