About us › Our story
How Synarii came to life.
Hi, I'm Chris — co-founder and developer of Synarii, alongside my wife, Shayla. We're groomers on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. This is how two people who wash and clip dogs for a living ended up building software for salons.
I've always been the one who fixes the system
At high school I was the unofficial IT support — the one students, and even teachers, came to when they'd locked themselves out of their accounts. It was my first real lesson in how complex systems work behind the scenes.
Before grooming I spent ten years in car sales, and I couldn't stop tinkering there either. I wrote pricing calculators and contract programs for the dealerships I worked at, just to make life easier for the sales teams.
Three salons, 25 staff — and no time to groom
In 2020 I joined Shayla in our grooming business. We pushed hard and grew fast: at our peak we owned three salons and managed a team of more than 25. Then, one particularly chaotic Christmas, we hit a wall. We were working incredibly long days and we weren't actually grooming any more — we were managing teams and trying to keep the books full.
So we made a big change. We merged the salons into one, supported our team members in following their own dreams, and deliberately downsized. We put our prices up so we could groom a smaller number of dogs at our own pace, finish at a normal hour, and get our lives back.
The same problems, in every salon in the country
Through those busy years Shayla and I were also touring Australia with our Better in Business seminars and one-on-one coaching, teaching groomers how to build profit and win back their time. A clear pattern emerged: groomers everywhere were facing exactly the same issues, and we were giving everyone the same answers.
Instead of fixing those problems one groomer at a time, the industry needed one system that solved them automatically.
"I'd spend my days bathing, drying and prepping dogs for Shayla — and if I heard her mention a frustrating bottleneck, I'd spend my time at the tub working out how to code a solution for it."
Two years of late nights, tested on our own table
Downsizing gave me the time to finally sit down and build. I built Synarii for Shayla first — but I designed it to scale, just in case. It took more than two years of nights after the family went to bed, weekends and early mornings. I'd write a change, bring it into our salon, run it live on a real day, and go back to refine it.
One of the very first things we built was Mia. She was running in the background for well over a year before we launched. We didn't just want an AI that could answer messages and take bookings — we spent that time teaching her groomer logic. She understands how a salon should flow, knows the breeds and coat types, and knows how to place appointments in the right order for an efficient day.
Shayla
- 5th in the world. Shayla represented Australia at Groomania 2024 in Belgium and placed fifth.
- 2019 Australian grooming champion, with many more grooming awards to her name.
- Twenty years in the industry, training groomers around the world and a regular guest on grooming podcasts internationally. More at shaylaknipe.com.au.
- As seen on Pooch Perfect — we both appeared on the TV grooming series, which aired in several countries.
- Still on the tools. Her salon runs on Synarii every working day — nothing reaches your salon until it has survived a full day in ours.
Why it exists
Taking back control, systemising the chaos and working smarter — that's the foundation of Synarii. We built it to give you the same freedom and balance we fought for in our own business. And when you email us, you reach the two people who built it and use it.