Anyone Can Sell Hair Extensions, But Can You Trust Them?
Mark Yudell
Posted on December 16 2014
Do a Google search for terms such as “virgin hair”, or “hair
extensions” or “Remy Indian hair” and what you will find is 100s of companies all
promising the same things. They have the best virgin hair, they travel the world
for the best sources, etc, selling products that all look the same. Are there really that many companies out
there that have gone thru the R&D, enormous expense of buying raw material
and then manufacturing it? The answer is
no.
What the consumer does not understand is that it is not hard
to setup a website, take a few pictures and sell a product made by some
inexpensive third party factory. Just as
there are 100s of online companies promising to have the best hair, there are
as many trading companies and factories advertising the same thing to all of
those extension companies. All one has
to do is create an extension website and wait as dozens of these trading
companies will begin emailing offers claiming to be factories selling the best quality
at the cheapest prices in any texture you could dream. You want wavy hair extensions? They got it.
Straight hair extensions? You got
it. They will claim to have every exotic
type of hair that people want that simply does not exist (such as Malaysian)
and at the cheapest prices.
They will send beautiful pictures and samples that seem
nice. The really scary part is even the
factories themselves don’t always know what raw material they are buying, and
cannot tell the difference between Remy and Non-Remy. So many times when their products are of lower
quality than they advertise they simply don’t know how that has happened or how
to prevent it from happening in the future. They don’t even understand the true
effect their processes of adding texture to create wavy hair extensions and the
damage it causes. But since most
companies are buying hair from these third party factories rather than taking
the time and expense to do the R&D to see what they are actually buying, the
consumer gets stuck with products of a completely different quality than they
were promised. The factory is told by a
dealer that they are purchasing Burma, or Brazilian, or Malaysian hair, when in
fact it’s all Remy Indian or even non-Remy Indian human hair. So everyone involved, from the factories to
the resellers to the consumers all want to believe that what they are getting
is a great deal when they don’t really have the necessary knowledge or
understanding to determine what they are truly getting.
The reality is most people see the demand for hair extensions
and assume they can do it too, making a quick dollar. Many talented stylists I have met cannot even
tell the difference between good hair and bad before it’s too late. They purchase hair identified as Virgin, when
in fact it’s not, and then sell it as Virgin having no idea what they are
ACTUALLY selling because that is the catch phrase that will yield higher
sales. They throw around terms that have
developed throughout pop culture such as Malaysian, Brazilian, etc., when many
of these types of hair simply do not exist (in the case of Malaysian) or is in
very limited supply so that the real versions of it are hard and costly to
source (Brazilian, Peruvian). They
continue to perpetuate the various misconceptions about hair extensions that
most consumers have because they only know what they have been taught by the
same misguided companies. Misconceptions
such as 1) all virgin hair is the same 2) if hair is virgin it must be Remy…..etc. I encourage you to read my blog on “The Most
Common Misconceptions of the Hair Extensions Industry”.
Unfortunately, few are selling virgin hair and even fewer
have any idea how their products were made or what they were made with. Most mislead the consumer and falsely
advertise their hair as being something its not or even worse, don’t know what
it is they are selling.
