How 64 Seattle regulars helped The Ladies Room reopen after a closure

When Ladywell’s closed during the pandemic, Christy Renee Donnelly was one of the regulars who felt the loss. The spa had been a fixture in Seattle for years, the kind of place women booked standing appointments at and showed up to alone on a Sunday afternoon to sit in the pool and not talk to anyone. Then it was gone. Christy reopened the space as The Ladies Room, kept the women-only ethos that had made the original work, and added All Gender Wednesdays so everyone who had loved Ladywell’s could come back too.

The Ladies Room is a day spa in Seattle. It runs on a small footprint: a pool, treatment rooms, a reception area, and a staff small enough that the front desk recognizes most clients by name. The business has grown steadily since Christy opened it, enough that the original two treatment rooms started turning bookings away. The spa was operating at capacity on the days clients most wanted to come in. That is a good problem and an expensive one. Growing the business meant spending money before earning it.

There was a more immediate problem, too. In July of 2024, the Seattle Health Department’s standards for pool maintenance required work the spa could not put off. The pool steps and floors needed retiling. The pool decking needed repair. The reception area needed remodeling to bring it into compliance and to make it function for a busier business. Christy closed the spa for two weeks and got the work done. Two weeks of closure is two weeks of no revenue for a business whose revenue comes one appointment at a time.

A traditional small-business loan was not the obvious fit. Spas are a hard category to underwrite. The revenue is real but the books are appointment-based, the equipment is not the kind of collateral a bank gets excited about, and the timeline a borrower wants rarely matches the timeline a bank works on. Christy did not name a specific bank in the campaign materials. What she did name was the work she wanted to do and the speed she wanted to do it at.

Why a community raise fit the business

The Ladies Room found Honeycomb Credit and opened a raise on September 30, 2024 with a $124,000 goal. The campaign closed on October 31 at $69,600 from 64 investors. The structure of Honeycomb’s offering is a fixed-rate, fixed-term community-funded loan: the business keeps every share of equity, and the people who funded the raise get paid back with interest over the life of the loan.

For a spa whose clients are also its strongest advocates, the structure does work a bank loan cannot. Sixty-four investors are sixty-four people who already book appointments, who already tell friends about the place, who now also have a small stake in seeing the business grow. That kind of advocacy is hard to buy and easy to underestimate. It is the closest thing a service business has to a marketing budget that compounds.

What the capital is funding

The money is going to three things, in roughly the order the business needed them. The first is the work the Health Department required: the retiling, the decking repair, the reception remodel. That work is already done; the two-week closure in July was the cost of getting it done quickly rather than letting it stretch across a slower process.

The second is the third treatment room. A spa with two rooms turns away the clients it most wants to keep. A spa with three rooms can take the standing appointment and the walk-in on the same afternoon. The math on the third room is the simplest math in the raise: more capacity at the moment of peak demand is more revenue, and the room pays for itself faster than almost any other piece of equipment a spa can buy.

The third is a Front Desk Manager. The role exists in part because Christy cannot run a growing spa and the front desk at the same time, and in part because the front desk is where a spa makes or breaks a client relationship. A dedicated manager handles the booking calls, the schedule, the staff who run the rooms, and the small daily decisions that keep a service business feeling like a place people want to return to. It is the kind of hire that does not show up in the marketing budget but does show up in the rebooking rate.

Christy opened The Ladies Room in the space of a spa Seattle lost. The 64 investors who funded the raise are mostly people who knew that space, or who found The Ladies Room and decided they wanted it to be there for a while.