Crave for hair extensions - High duties, imitated products threaten locals
For many young ladies, a fashion statement is incomplete without an elegant hair style. If well styled, a modish hairdo adds to a lady’s bubble beauty and increases her confidence.
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But if left unkempt, the hair becomes a point of repulsion that can weigh down her self esteem. This explains why hair extensions have become the order of the day among Ghana’s youthful female populace.
However, behind this integral part of fashion is a business that is now reeling under pressure from various types of challenges.
Ms Sena Asare, who is one of these entrepreneurs in the hair extension business, mentioned high duties and the influx of fake Chinese hair products as some of the major challenges facing the business
“The import duties are too much and they just keep increasing. This is a threat to the success of the hair extension business,” she told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS July 12.
“There is also another problem of some Chinese companies who have set up in Ghana and area retailing hair extensions.
Although their entry means bad news for the locals, Ms Sena said patronage for her brand of hair extensions was still strong.
She said the business was generally lucrative as her company made an average of 20 per cent or more profit in a year.
“In a good year, we buy and sell over 20,000 pieces but in a not so lucrative year, we sell almost half of that figure,” she said.
She also mentioned high import duties on the products as another challange affecting the trade.
The duties, she said “just keep increasing” and expressed the hope that the rates would be reduced to help them import more to feed the growing market.
Business opportunities
Generally, hair extensions are either natural (human) or synthetic and each of the two categories comes in different types, forms, shapes and colours.
Although the human hair is generally move expensive, people in this part of the continent prefer it to the synthetic ones mainly because it is easy to style and are more durable.
This explains why many Ghanaian women are now enthused by human hair, thereby creating employment avenues and vibrant business ventures for hundreds of Ghanaians across the country.
The hair extension business is a highly lucrative venture that evolved from advancement in modern fashion trends.
With demand for hair extensions on the rise, many entrepreneurs have devised various ways of cashing in on it.
Among them are the wholesalers who now use the internet with the help of blogs and social media to market and sell the hair pieces.
Many of young ladies have taken up the venture and are doing quite well in the field.
Checks by the paper, however, showed that many wholesalers normally rebranded the same types of hair with new names and logos and sell them as new ones whenever their clients became bored with the existing brands.
This ensures that the importers and distributors do not run at loss.
It is, however, an intriguing aspect of the business as it shows that there will always be patronage no matter how stale a brand has become; all it needs is to repackage.