The global hair wigs and extension market is estimated to hit a revenue of $10 billion. Yes, that’s billion with a “b” and dollars with a “d.” You can make so much from starting a hair business. Of course, you know it’s not easy but that’s why you have our “how to start a hair business” guide to help you.
In our article today, we will be demystifying the hair wig and extension business and walk you through a surefire way to make real money selling hair.
To make this article resourceful to as many people as possible, we will be giving information that will help the budget entrepreneur begin a bare-bones hair business. You can then take this template and scale it up as it suits the scale of the business you intend to run.
That said, welcome to class!
Table of Contents
First Things First: Your Mindset Matters
You can have all the necessary resources at your fingertips but once your mind is giving off negative energy, it wouldn’t matter. Some people say you have to be passionate about hair to sell hair. We say not necessarily. Nobody has to be passionate about anything to sell anything. You just need to understand the market and have a great work ethic.
The work ethic is where the mindset comes in. If you’re going into this business or any other business to become an overnight millionaire, that’s greed, and you will most likely fail.
The right mindset for business is a positive one, but it is also a realistic and highly adaptable one. If your mind isn’t all of this, succeeding will be very difficult for you. Maybe even impossible.
You need to go in hoping for the best. But your goals, while challenging enough to push you, must also be grounded in reality. Another thing about being realistic is that you must keep it in the front burner of your mind that this is life and your business is bound to encounter a couple of snafus along the way.
Lastly, about adaptation. The covid pandemic of 2020 has disrupted businesses in unprecedented ways. It has also reshaped consumer culture around the world tremendously. Needless to say, only businesses that take note of these things are going to succeed in the post-covid era.
Now, Just How Much About Hair Do You Know?
No, you do not have to be passionate about hair to sell hair. But common sense tells us that going into a business that you know next to nothing about is the very foundation for failure. So, just before you put in your money where your mouth is, maybe put in a little research where your mouth is first.
Our website is updated daily with helpful resources to help you in your hair adventures. We want to make it easier for all hair aficionados to access the information they need from one place. So, make sure you check out our blog regularly. If you’re a hair novice, we recommend that you click here to read our hair extensions crash course first. And also click here to check out our hair glossary as well for all the terminologies you need to know so you don’t get lost in the hair market.
The First W Question: Who is Your Target Customer?
This is what you learn on the first day of business class, right? You must be able to properly and articulately define who your target customer is. Note that we didn’t say target audience, that’s too broad and we’ll only give you generic details. You might think that niching down will narrow your options but that’s not true.
Let’s use fishing as an analogy. When you know the particular kind of fish you want to catch, it would affect what you take along with you when preparing for your expedition. It would also affect what part of the sea you fish in. Fishes don’t all live in the same part of the ocean. They don’t even all live in the same parts of the world.
So, be as specific as you can about your target customer. Doing this, you’ll get information on who these people are, where you can find them, what their purchasing power is, and what their tastes in hair are. This leads us to the next point.
The Second W Question: What Kind of Hair Do You Want to Sell?
As we said earlier, this would have to depend on your target customer. There are so many different types of hair extensions and weaves, it would make your head spin just thinking of them. You, surely, won’t be able to sell all. So, it’s best to focus on a couple, at the most, especially when you’re just starting out.
We discussed hair extension types in our hair extensions crash course. You can click here to read that.
There are weaves and there are wigs. Weaves are more affordable than wigs. So, if you’re a beginner, we usually recommend that you begin by selling weaves. This will help you test your market. And then, as you begin to build a good reputation among your clients, you can then begin to introduce the more expensive wigs. Lace front wigs, u-part wigs, and 360 frontal wigs are the most desired because of how realistic they look.
Weaves come in different types, lengths, and textures and this would affect prices, especially the weave type. If you want to do virgin hair, strictly, then you’d need more capital than someone who decides to sell Remy hair. In the same way that someone selling Remy hair would need more capital than someone selling non-Remy hair.
Another thing you’d need to understand about hair types that would affect the amount of capital you’d require to start up is the grade of hair you’d be selling. You probably have come across hairs labeled as grade 7a or 8a or 9a. The higher the grade, the higher the quality of the hair. Generally, the lowest you want to go is a 7a. At Spreadit Global Hair Store, you’d only find grades 8a, 9a, or 10a because we only want to stock the best for you. This way, when you buy, you’re always certain of the quality.
One More W: Where do You Want to Sell?
This is another question that naturally arises after you describe your target customer. It’s a question that’s easy to ignore, but don’t fall into that temptation. You have to decide whether you’d be selling in a physical shop or online or both.
But Here’s Our Candid Advice
If you’re just starting out, it might be best to begin selling online. The obvious reason for this is that it reduces startup costs significantly. No need to rent a shop that can run into hundreds of thousands (or even millions), depending on where you’re renting your space.
Besides, considering that you’d have to be within the vicinity of hair buyers, your shop would have to be located in a high-brow area and it has to be tastefully furnished too. Call it a vain industry if you want, but here, looks sell. If you want to make people look beautiful, your store must look elite.
If you’re selling online, you escape all that stress. All you have to do is get a good web designer to do a simple online store for you. It won’t be free but it will cost you considerably less.
Remember, We’re in the Post-Covid Era Already
Besides that, this is the post-covid era we talked about initially. People are beginning to realize that it is possible to do nearly everything from the comfort of their homes. You can be sure that fewer and fewer people would leave their houses to do anything if they absolutely didn’t have to. You need to factor this in as well.
One rule to live by when it comes to selling hair or anything at all online is that visual is everything. Your photos must be excellent. No matter how high quality your products are, once your photos undersell them or are underwhelming, your patronage would suffer.
This is an era where getting photos of amazing quality is getting easier and cheaper. So, consumers are expecting more in terms of picture quality. This applies to anything that requires you to share visual content online.
Remember, for hair, as with most products, a white background is best because it allows the colors of the products to pop.
Now, Let’s Talk About Your Hair Supplier
Most of the hairs you see whether they call them Brazilian, Vietnamese, Peruvian, Indian, or whatever, most likely come from China. So, that’s the best place to get your hair: from the manufacturers in China. These manufacturers are also in Dubai. So, we import hair from China and Dubai.
When choosing the hair to buy from our Product Finder, note whether it’s coming from China or Dubai. Dubai is where we are beginning to ship most of our hair from because shipping and clearing are a whole lot faster and cheaper.
But if you’re just starting, you, definitely, do not have the means to go to travel to China or Dubai yet. Good for you, there are a number of ways you can fix that.
One way to do this is to buy from AliExpress. But, then you really have to be careful who you are dealing with. If you’re new to AliExpress or even Alibaba, you could get scammed.
This is why we usually prefer that you buy from a personal distributor. The reason for this is you have someone to go back to if you don’t get what you pay for. Yes, these things are resolvable on AliExpress and Alibaba. But it takes time and there’s always that off chance that you don’t get your money back.
At Spreadit Global Product Finder, we source our hair directly from manufacturers in China and Dubai. Our staff in China or Dubai get your orders from the manufacturers and personally inspect them for quality assurance purposes.
Once you order, your goods get to you in a record time of two to three weeks regardless of where you are in the West African sub-continent. We also have a 100% money-back guarantee too.
So, there’s definitely no risk to you at all when you buy from us. This is, definitely, something you want, especially when you’re just starting off a new business and only have a limited amount of capital.
On Drop Shipping
Dropshipping is all the rave now if you’re familiar with the b2c world. If you’re not, drop shipping simply means, you place an order on behalf of your customer to your hair supplier and they fulfill it for you by delivering it to the end consumer on your behalf.
This way, you don’t have to have a shop or warehouse where you store your hair. You don’t even need a lot by way of capital either. Simply check out the hairs available on our website, share photos on your social media, and get people’s orders. You place the order on our site and we fulfill it for you.
Sorry, But Someone’s Got to Do the Paperwork!
…And that someone is you. Many people ignore this part but they suffer for it, ultimately. You should have a business plan. We assume you already thought about the name and all of that. Registering your business should be in the works but, especially in Nigeria, it’s not terribly high on your list of to-dos. As you scale up, there would naturally come a time when you must register your business. But for now, let’s focus on growing the business.
To do that masterfully, rather than playing a guessing game, you’d need a business plan. Yes, things change really fast. But going into a business without a plan is like journeying to an unknown place without a map because there might be an accident on the way and a resulting traffic jam. Quite on the contrary, it is with a map that you’d be able to see if there are alternative routes you can take to get to where you’re going faster.
It’s like parenting, you can get all the good advice in the world but until you start raising your kids, you really don’t get what those older parents have been telling you. In the same way, these steps might look straightforward enough till it’s time to actually draw up a plan. If you make the mistake of launching your business with the steps we’ve given you here just in your head, you will end up wasting time and resources. Draw a plan with pen and paper or on your computer.
Brand!
Once you’ve cleared up all that, it’s time for you to brand. And by that, we don’t mean that you should go and get a logo. Yes, you’d need a logo as part of your branding but a brand isn’t a logo. A brand is user experience, i.e. how your customers feel interacting with you as a business.
Now, branding does not mean that you should come off as standoffish and larger than life. People buy from people not from brands. The best brands think of their brands as unique individuals with a personality, temperaments, likes, dislikes, and the rest.
You want your customers to feel like they are interacting with a person rather than a “company.” So, drop the “too formal” persona and get more personable with your customers. Offer exceptional customer service just as you offer high-quality products.
By the way, can help you brand your hair to give it a unique and professional touch.
Declare the Doors of Business Open!
Now that you have everything ready, it’s time to take the bull by the horn and open the doors of the business. You’ll probably feel excited and petrified all at once but that’s because business is an adventure. Remember, no venture, no crown.
Don’t overthink things. You’ve drawn up your plan, now just focus on making that one sale, and then the other, and then the other, and the other after that.
Of course, don’t forget that you have to promote your brand to expand your customer base and bring in more income. Some of the ways you can promote your business includes running ads on social media, running fun contests to create engagement, or running discount offers once in a while. Promoting your business is not an optional thing. It’s mandatory if your business is to, not just grow, but to keep existing.
We’re Rooting for You — Let Us Know How We Can Help
We’re dedicated to the success of your business. So, please reach out to us via any of our social media platforms or via email if there’s any way you’d like us to be of help to you as it concerns your hair business.
Like the Jewish say, mazel tov! And keep being awesome.
Click here to source the best premium quality hairs and begin your business right away!