Selling Hair Extensions: How to Avoid Failure

One common question we see on Facebook is: “How to sell hair extensions?” There are many people who want to start a hair business, and jump straight into finding a vendor. If that’s you, then keep on reading and stop yourself from making a mistake. Definitely don’t start out buying a vendor list. If you want to know why, read this article.

The Downfall in Selling Hair

You’ve found a vendor with great quality hair for a fair price. You’ve made a website, and are posting your products on Facebook and Instagram.

You will most likely find out that you’re getting very few visits to your website. A few people like your posts on social media, but no one is really buying them. Some of your friends support you by buying your hair, but once they got it, they’re good for another half year. This is what’s happening to most people who start selling hair.

Finding a vendor is relatively easy. Making sales is where most people fail at.

How to sell hair extensions?

That you have a quality product, doesn’t mean that people know that people can find you or are convinced that they should buy from you. Marketing is really about making yourself getting seen, and convincing people to go with your products. So if you want to know how to sell hair extensions, you should really learn about marketing.

Marketing Step 1: Getting seen

If you start a lemonade stand on your driveway, you will be seen by your neighbors. If you just started your own website, it’s the equivalent of starting a lemonade stand at the top of an apartment building: If no one knows that you exist, it will be impossible to get sales.

It’s the same for selling hair. Ways to get seen would be putting up billboards, building a social media following, handing out flyers, joining any events, paying for ads, mouth-to-mouth advertising, proper SEO for your website, and more. In general people filter out a lot of information, and will need to be exposed to your products/brand multiple times before you make it through their brain’s filters. Whatever method you choose, you will have to do it consistently.

Marketing Step 2: Convincing People

But even if people know that you exist, that doesn’t mean that they will buy from you. There probably are many people selling hair in your area, and people should have a reason to buy from you instead. Some people are convinced by low prices (i.e. Wish), some by beautiful product pictures of beautifully customized wigs, an overwhelming number of positive real reviews, some by YouTube reviews, and some by a friend recommending them, others by having their own hands on the product, easy accessibility, or it solves one of the problems they’re facing daily.

When you’re trying to get exposure in any way, don’t randomly pay for ads and hope it will work. Really think about what makes your products special and why people should buy your products. This will give you an idea of how to approach your business and successfully sell hair extensions.

Examples of strategies:

You want to sell customized wigs.

Most of your competitors selling hair, sell pre-made wigs directly from a vendor and have very limited customization options. There are some colored ones, but they’re generally bad quality. Few people make beautifully customized wigs, especially ones with a custom color. Good coloring work requires you to find a vendor with high quality hair. Those who already sell customized wigs and do well, make beautiful photos of their products and have a very positive following. You already know how to make wigs and do custom color work, but you don’t know how to make great photos. One of your learning goals will be to learn about product/portrait photography.

You want to sell hair extensions of high quality.

Many people claim to sell high quality hair, and their reviews show otherwise. Simply posting pictures of bundles wouldn’t help as much, as quality can only be experienced, not just seen from a random picture. To make it worse, there are so many people posting pictures of bundles, they would just disappear into the background anyhow. So possibly a more hands-on experience would be better. Ideas for this would be having easily accessible samples in a pop-up shop, or in your/a salon. If you’re a stylist and your clients really trust you, it will be easy to recommend them your quality and guide them with maintaining it. With your excellent customer service, clients will keep coming back.

You want to sell bundles and closures: failing to plan = planning to fail.

This is what everyone is doing nowadays. You’re not only competing with some sellers in your own country, but also directly competing with the vendor you directly buy your hair from. You basically offer nothing unique, but still charge more than your vendor does. It’s extremely easy to get lost in the ocean of competitors. While some people are able to succeed doing this, but most will fail. You post pictures of your products on social media, but all your competitors do the same and have a higher following than you. You end up paying for adds and get very little ROI. The uniqueness element is missing, and that’s what’s likely to make you fail as well.

If you want to do what everyone else is doing, you’re already late to the game. There’s plenty of money to be made selling hair in the hair industry, But when you’re joining it without a proper strategy and without a desire to be unique, you’re planning to fail.

Use your imagination – or a friend

Convincing other people to buy your products is hard. Sometimes you have to put yourself into a hypothetical situation. If you lack the imagination, you could also ask your friends.

Imagine that you’re a potential buyer. You don’t know anything about your products, but you run into your website by accident. If you browse through your website, would you feel convinced to buy the products? Unless you’ve got an amazingly optimized website using different beautiful models, the answer is probably going to be no.

If you see your own product pictures, would you be convinced to buy them? Probably not. So which style of product pictures really appeal to you? Simply have a look at your competitors and see which ones really use great product pictures. Try to recreate these with your own products.

Really try to be unbiased, and realistic rather than optimistic, and be honest to yourself. Ask your friends to be brutally honest as well, as this feedback will be something that will make you much more likely to succeed as well. The goal isn’t to become pessimistic and talk yourself out of selling hair, and it’s simply to iron out the kinks that would stop people from buying from you.

Keep asking yourself questions

• Would you be willing to pay the price you’re charging for your products?
• Are you becoming convinced that you offer quality products by looking at your material?
• If you put your products in the middle of 5 of your competitors, would you buy from yourself?

Just keep asking yourself these questions, and if the answer is no, see what it is that you could do to try and fix it. When you’re just starting out, you probably don’t know how to sell hair, and there’s no way to get it right the first time. It will be an iterative process. Keep making notes of what you can improve and while you keep doing that, you will get a much better sense for how to improve your business.

While perfection is a great goal to have, just realize that it’s a long-term goal, and not something achieved in a short period of time. You’re investing time into learning how to become successful at selling hair, and that’s going to take a lot of effort.

Short tips:

Websites

A website is nothing more than a place where you can sell hair extensions. You put your information there about your business, your products and give your clients an easy way to purchase your products.

To create a successful website, you will have to drive traffic to it. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one method, where you write articles and great product descriptions with a focus on certain keywords. This way you can slowly work your way up the search results, or pay for clicks on those keywords.

Other ways are simply by posting links on your social media, or slowly creating brand recognition where people start searching your brand.

Once you got enough traffic, it will become about converting this traffic into sales. For example you charging a shipping fee, rather than offering free shipping, could be a reason why people refuse to check out after adding products to their cart. Maybe your product pictures aren’t that good, and people aren’t driven emotionally to want to purchase that hair. There are many reasons why people will not purchase a product, and it will be up to you to find out why.

A website can be great to sell hair extensions at, but isn’t always required. If you’re selling customized wigs according to certain specifications, it simply becomes quite difficult to offer all these options through a product on your website. In certain situations it would become better to sell them on another platform like Facebook for example simply.

Research

You should base your strategy on your research. Just take the example of customized wigs.

Colored wigs from vendors are mostly bad quality. People desire bleached knots and custom colors. Those who post high-quality customized wigs generally get a positive following. Very few of them have websites. These are some simple basic conclusions that can come out of research and that you could base your strategy on.

Don’t just start to sell hair extensions without having done your research and having come up with a proper strategy.

Pictures

Look at these pictures. Which do you find most appealing?

Number 1 and number 6 are professionally taken pictures of products. They’re what you’re used to seeing from those who sell hair extensions and they’re kind of boring. What’s even worse, is making unprofessional pictures in these styles. If your pictures are blurry, have bad lighting, you’re not going to convince anyone to buy your products.

Number 2 number 3, and number 4 are a great way to present pictures of products. Number 3 is especially well done, and literally every successful hair company uses pictures like this. Chinese vendors can’t produce these easily, and tend to steal them. While they generally do well, it’s not exactly something positive.

Pictures like number 5 are especially great for showing the quality of your services.

Try to look up pictures of other sellers. See which ones are attractive to you, and which ones aren’t. Try to copy the style from those which are appealing to you!

Our photography setup

For our product pictures, we use a setup with 2 JINBEI 400W strobe (flash) lights with a Sony EV-Z10. They’re synced up with a small device.

The hair is laid on a non-reflective white background, and the strobes are positioned either side.

Pictures are shot in raw format. ISO is kept low (100-200) to reduce grain. We generally set the camera to F16 to create a larger focus area so that all the hair is sharp in frame. Lower value would mean you would get a Depth of Field effect, which might be good for wigs or shooting pictures of clients. The small f, we generally set to f/100 or f/125 as this lets enough light true to get a picture in roughly the right brightness.

As long as you shoot in RAW format, you don’t need to get the pictures perfect, and you can still edit them in Photoshop. Generally we increase the brightness a bit, as it gets rid of the gradient in the background. One issue with blonde hair or fine hairs, is that they kinda get washed out, meaning some of the hair start disappearing.

As you see below, we do get a blue tint in most of our pictures as we store hair in blue boxes, in blue racks. Mostly you can play around with the color temperature and the tint settings to get these out. It becomes quite clear once you turn the vibrancy and saturation all the way up.

It’s a learning process, and every photoshoot we do, we get a little bit better at shooting pictures and editing them.

Last Notes

Basics to get you started

By no means I’m a marketing expert. I’m just someone who has been selling hair for 7-8 years and who picked up on a thing or two. We’re talking with a lot of people who want to start selling hair, love our samples, but never make it to becoming successful. They simply don’t know how to sell hair and thought finding a vendor would be enough. We want you to succeed, so that’s one reason we share this information.

These are just some very, very basic tips to get people started on thinking about certain marketing strategies rather than buying hair and hoping it will sell. You could try to figure out most of it yourself, but creative thinking becomes easier when you have a partner(s).

Hiring coaches/mentors

You could even hire a coach to help you out. Just remember that many coaches are a waste of time. If you ever learned a language, and all your teacher did was teach you new words, you probably never mastered that language. Only if you actively start using all your knowledge and apply it to communicating in that language outside of school, that’s when you be able to master it. A bad coach will just tell you, “Take better pictures” and “Pay for ads.” A good coach will teach you, for example, about a proper 3-point lighting setup used in portraits and how to develop an additional strategy and optimize your content.

Our approach

At Bossique our Orange line is some of the highest quality hair in the market. It’s really unrivaled quality. The difficulty is convincing people that it actually is. People have been lied to, and not everyone knows how to recognize the highest quality hair. We do want to sell hair extensions, and our approach is to build trust with potential clients by giving a lot of valuable information for free on our blog. We make it quite cheap to even experience it for yourself with our free sample.

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A lot of our articles first start out on our Facebook page. Follow us there and feel free to leave your questions there, or contact us through WhatsApp/iMessage: +86 135 3369 3283. We do not offer any coaching, but do sell hair extensions.