ArtistryHost is a Square native booking platform built for experience-based businesses, the kind of company that doesn’t fit neatly into any existing category of booking software. It was created by Kenny Straub, co-founder of the candle and wine franchise brand Cork & Candles, after years spent trying to force his own business into systems that were never built for it. What began as a fix for one company’s franchise consistency problem has grown into a platform now available for operators everywhere.

Solving Its Own Problem First

Cork & Candles doesn’t fit a single category. It isn’t a restaurant, though guests order wine. It isn’t a salon, though every visit is booked ahead. And it’s a retailer too, since every guest leaves with something they made. “No off-the-shelf system was built for all three at once,” Straub says. Over the years, the company cycled through one booking platform after another: Clover paired with Bookeo, then Acuity, FareHarbor, Peek, and Stripe. “We tried hard to make Square Appointments fit, but appointment tools think in one-to-one services and our unit is a party of six with venue-wide capacity rules,” Straub explains. A two-year run on Toast could handle a restaurant, but it buried the experience side of the business under complexity it didn’t need. Through it all, the numbers lived in two places, reconciled by hand every night.

Collaborating with Spadea Lignana

The breaking point came as Cork & Candles moved toward franchising. Conversations with attorneys at Spadea Lignana kept coming back to the same idea: a brand is only as enforceable as it is consistent. “Our franchise counsel at Spadea Lignana helped us see it as a consistency decision first, and that reframing changed how we built our company,” Straub says. A brand standard only holds up if it applies the same way at every location, and unit-level data only means something if every location produces it the same way. That realization is what pushed Kenny Straub to stop patching together five different systems and build the one his business actually needed.

Building What Didn’t Exist

Of every platform Straub had tried, Square was the one his staff learned fastest and trusted most. “The gap was never Square,” he says. “It was that nothing on the market spoke experiences.” So he built that missing piece himself. The result, ArtistryHost, runs on top of a business’s own Square account and handles private per-group bookings, capacity tied to party size, card-on-file no-show protection, run sheets for the floor team, and multi-location reporting that consolidates bookings, retail, and gift cards into one report per unit.

Where the Platform Stands

Four Cork & Candles locations run on Square and ArtistryHost today, with ten more planned by the end of 2026. Ninety-six percent of bookings now arrive with a card on file, and no-shows have fallen to 5.8% in a recent month, measured the same way at every location. Nine out of ten guests who start checkout complete it, and reporting that used to require reconciling two separate systems now comes from one, saving roughly 20 hours of admin work a week.

A Lesson for Other Operators

Straub’s advice to any founder eyeing franchising goes beyond the software itself. “Fix your consistency before you franchise your inconsistency,” he says. “The legal structure and the operating systems aren’t separate projects. They’re the same promise, made twice.” That idea is what ArtistryHost is built on: a system created by an operator who had to solve the problem himself before he could franchise his own brand, now available to any experience-based business facing the same gap.

ArtistryHost grew out of a problem no other booking platform had solved: how to run a business built on private group experiences with the consistency a franchise brand requires. Built first to serve Cork & Candles’ own locations, it’s now available to operators looking to solve the same problem before they scale.

Learn more about ArtistryHost.