Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Africa

Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Africa

Dec 29, 2019 | Darling Hair

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Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Africa

Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. They are planning to grow in neighbouring countries soon. Profit from the insight Darling gives about their successful strategy. This strategy gave Darling Hair Sales a stable double-digit growth. Adapt the strategy to your own position and give your hair sales a boost.

Darling shows Selling Hair at Double Digits Growth and you?

Darling Hair is a brand owned by Indian Consumer Product giant Godrej. Thanks to this Darling can show double digits sales growth year on year. This gives you a good benchmark to know if your hair business is healthy. If your sales show a growth of 10 percent or less, you can learn from the strategy Darling Selling Hair.

You should never copy the strategy from another company. But there is nothing wrong to learn from others. Especially when the other is the number One Selling Hair in Africa, Darling!

The Overall Strategy

For the Consumer Products in general the mother company of Darling Hair has defined the following. In bold the strategy formulated and after this a translation to your situation. This gives you great suggestions for your own hair selling business.

  • Keep the Core Business Healthy. This means you should always have the right focus on the business people know your business for;
  • Create New Growth Boosters. Plan to regularly launch new products or services;
  • Ensure Adequate Funding to Support Growth. Keep an eye on your cash flow, once a year scrutinize your expenses. Is the supply chain still optimal or can you make things more efficient;
  • Pursue Sensible Acquisitions to Accelerate Growth. Think about a collaboration with a stylist or salon to broaden your market and to grow faster;
  • Build a Higher Performing Organisation. Every day see if you can do things more efficient, logistics, purchase, marketing, selling, bookkeeping;
  • Do Our Part for an Inclusive and Sustainable World, invest and participate in your community

The strategy above shows you can not write your business plan and sit back and relax. You have to work on the company, the world around you, your clients, the competition and the suppliers, changes all the time and you have to adapt to this. Surprise your clients with new products or services. Look for a collaboration with a stylist or salon and work out together a new hair product or service. Do not do the numbers once a year for tax purposes only. But check on a monthly basis how your profit margins evolve, and your commitments where can you cut expenses. Start the conversation with the hair supplier and see how you can get a shorter time to delivery. Do not forget every morning to think what have I done yesterday and what can I do better or faster. And make sure the local community knows you care.

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How does Darling Increase Selling Hair

Darling hair is increasing the sales of the hair and growing their business because the follow the following guidelines (in bold). See my suggestions for you how to put this in place in your own business:

  • Invest heavily in the brand. Select your logo and brand and be active on social media and local events
  • Innovate Your Products. Make your products available for everybody. Perhaps you have to organize a special event near a college, or think about other payment methods;
  • Be Unique. Think about how your products can be unique in solving the needs of your clients. Remember you are not selling hair; you are selling an experience;
  • Disruptive Pricing. Even if you are a small player, if you have a unique service you can be the price leader for that kind of hair solutions;
  • World Class Package and Design. Have eye and patient for the details like packaging and design.

No need to allocate all your money to market your brand. You can also use the lost hours in a day to keep the conversation going on Social Media or in real life. Make sure you have an inviting and eye-catching hair style. Go to the mall or places your ideal clients likes to be and get their attention. If people do not buy from you, it is possible they like the hair and they feel they get value for money. But they can not find a parking space or they payment method is not convenient for them. Spend time and energy to look after the slightest detail on packaging and website design. All this will help you to increase the sales of the hair.

Let’s get digital

Darling understands they have to get digital. This is both the marketing and the supply side. They team up with bloggers to be sure they will reach their ideal clients. Clients will find education on the hair and maintenance, but also how to use the tools available. How user friendly is your webstore for somebody who was not involved in the design? Use social listening to catch new trends before there is a standardize solution on the selves.

But also, the shopping experience should be smooth and help your supply chain to be the most efficient possible. Consider a platform like Shopify that provides both Point of Sale solutions for your store and a webstore. But also integrated drop shipping and payment facilities.

See how one point for every sale helps you selling more
Thanks to the digital world we know much more about customer behaviour then ever before. Darlings keeps on working on better measurement and reporting of the crucial drivers of customer behaviour. Do not only use your bookkeeping to know what drives your business. Measure and report behaviour using tools like Google Analytics and the analytic tools of your webstore.

Darling Hair Supply Chain

What is driving you to success and allows you to scale your business is a very efficient supply chain. How does the hair get ordered at the wholesale store. Shipped to you or the fulfillment centre and delivered at the doorstep of your client? This process should have your daily attention. Reduce complexity because this will also reduce the number of errors. On your quest for hair suppliers, take into account their order and delivery processes. Are they able to work out a supply process that supports your business?

The future

Darling has selected the countries they see as the upcoming markets for hair extensions. Next to mature hair markets like Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Nigeria. They have identified the countries that will be interesting for the near future, because they see the hair market will expand. Think of countries like Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, Ghana and Senegal. They even work on new distribution models; this all could be very interesting for new entrepreneurs too.

Get the all-in-one hair business package, complete with hair samples and launch your own hair store now

Ready to go for double digits growth and sell hair like Darling?

Are you ready to start selling hair or grow your hair business, leave a comment below or contact me on WhatsApp if you need any support!

An after Christmas sales drop is easy to avoid!

An after Christmas sales drop is easy to avoid!

Dec 23, 2019 | Get Help, Launch Your Web Store

Avoid an after Christmas sales drop

An after Christmas sales drop is easy to tackle! You can still make good deals but – as always- you only must be a little bit more creative. To help you to benefit from the still increasing demand and to have the clients visit your shop instead of the shop of the competition, we have selected five items for you to think and work on.
We give you more background information and we provide you with some links to make it work for you right away!

Update: December. 23rd, 2019

1. Offer additional items together with your extensions, at a special price

You know you are not selling hair, but you are selling a “look good” feeling, an experience. Your client wants to look good and you have the products and services to make her feel awesome! So why don´t you offer her, or him, together with the extensions, a very nice bag or another luxury item? Offer bags at a good price but at the right quality. You are in contact with your client, you make her happy with the hair so the perfect time to make the picture complete and offer her something extra.

Get the all-in-one hair business package, complete with hair samples and launch your own hair store now

2. Be creative in shipment and payment and stimulate after Christmas purchases

The first thing is of course not to charge separately for shipping anymore, clients do not want to see a shipping fee anymore. But clients also want to receive your extensions in time and as fast as possible. Why don´t you consider Collect on Delivery (COD). In the US for example (The United States Postal Services) USPS offers this service so your clients will have more confidence in the transaction and consider easier to buy from a new shop. By doing so you´ll reduce the delivery time after payment to zero! A great argument to convince your clients to buy from you.

One step further is to offer your clients to pay afterwards, how thoughtful of you! After they spent their money on Christmas gifts for others. Now they still can buy the hair they want and pay afterwards. Interesting? Klarna Pay Later is an invoicing payment method for Shopify Payments. When a customer selects Klarna Pay Later as their payment method, they agree to pay for their purchase later. Combined with a 14 days free trial you cannot miss this client friendly business opportunity.

Looking to build a successful online business? Get a free comprehensive guide that covers everything you need to know about running a dropshipping business.
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3.Are you on Amazon?

Offer part of your products through platforms like Amazon, or Jumia, more and more people search on.
Amazon and you can use their platform to offer your products to a bigger audience. Amazon has a very good ranking in the search results of Google and Yahoo you will directly benefit from this. Your ads will be targeted to shoppers searching for similar or related items on Amazon.com. They will see your ads in many places on the Amazon website and you will only pay for clients who clicked on your advertisement and thus visited your website!

4. Offer true bargains

Consumers have seen a lot of offers and special discounts the last months. But they are still interested, if the offer gives them value for money.
Only offer true bargains, after all you want your clients to return to buy again and to spread the word about the quality you offer.

5.Gift cards

Reach for the partner, family or friends of your clients and offer gift cards with a bonus.
Gift cards are hot, and you can benefit from this. A gift card of your own hair brand helps partners or friends to give their loved one or good friend your hair extensions without the risk of buying the wrong hair. The card can be made from paper or a specific coupon code that can be used together with the purchase of the hair. Do not forget to consider a paper gift card, paper still has more style over digital, right?

Ready to invest in your after Christmas sales? Let me know what options works best for you!

How to Sell Your Hair Extensions on YouTube

How to Sell Your Hair Extensions on YouTube

Nov 25, 2019 | Prepare for the Launch, Sell Online

Video, or movies deliver the most engaging content, and are seen as the best medium to show the beauty of the hair you are selling. Learn how to sell your hair extensions on YouTube.

Draw the attention for your video using a picture

To survive, our brains are trained to make decisions what gets our attention in seconds. When we all lived in the mother continent, Africa, this was the difference between eat or be eaten. To be honest, times did not change that much. Now it is the difference between selling hair or keep on dreaming. You need to make sure, your marketing message gets the attention. If not, nobody will ever see your gorgeous hair.

The thumbnail, the first impression

Make the thumbnail, the image that YouTube will display before people click on it, outstanding. Try to make something special out of it. The thumbnails should be an introduction of what the video will be showing. If there is a mismatch between the video content and the viewers expectation; they will bounce away before they will understand your message. If you want to know if the thumbnail you picked meets viewers expectation, check the drop-off of viewers in the first 10 to 15 seconds of your movie.

The thumbnail should inform the viewer about your brand. If you already have loyal followers and clients, they will be much more interested in your messages. Often before they will click on the message of the competition, unless they are not happy anymore.

Please, make sure the resolution of the image you use for the thumbnail is high enough. You must avoid blurry images. Check how the images look at the various devices, like smartphone, tablet or laptop.

You title should be short and telling everything, or at least make the viewer curious about what you are going to tell in your video.

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Drive your viewer to desirable action

Great your video is being watched, but you produced the video with a goal. Do you want:

to grow your YouTube channel (subscribe!)

to increase the watch time, which gives your channel a higher ranking

an interaction with your audience

your viewers to visit your website or hair blog.

YouTube helps to drive action from the viewer. These calls to actions are the reason you have published these videos.

YouTube works with cards to:
– promote a video or playlist,
– promote another channel,
– encourage viewers to participate in a poll and
– guide them to your website or blog.

Using the cards help you to get messages on the video that will encourage the user to interact.

You can also edit your movie before you upload the movie to YouTube. Using an editing app will give you more freedom to place your call to actions in a more creative way.

Experiment until you have the best performing video

Producing movies is one of the most creative ways to share your marketing message. You can experiment with how you play the movie, portrait (with black fields on the left and right side, more or less colours and much more variations).

Because every business is different, and every audience is different I advise you to experiment. To see what kind of production has the highest level of engagement.

No need to re produce the Titanic

Your video does not have to entertain your audience for a very long time. Although there are videos of one hour and more, but these are most often instruction videos. For example with the aim to build a website from scratch to the launch.

A short video per topic allows your audience to be selective in what they want to watch. Because of this their engagement will be higher as they choose themselves to see more about the topic.

Do not forget

After you published your video, you need to promote your video. Use all the channels you have available. Like Instagram, Facebook or twitter to tell the world about your latest video.

You can also include your latest release in your newsletter or embed it on the blogpost.

The more channels to share your video, the better. You can even integrate your Youtube channel in your Shopify Hair Store.

Neither should you forget to add the right key words. YouTube is one of the largest search engines, so make sure people will find your story.

Ready to Sell Your Hair Extensions on YouTube

Let me know if you are ready to post a YouTube movie to sell your hair. So I can promote you too!

How to grow your followers on your Facebook Hair Business Page

How to grow your followers on your Facebook Hair Business Page

Nov 24, 2019 | Launch Your Web Store, Sell Online

With millions of people wearing Hair Extensions using Facebook, of course you launch a Facebook Hair Business Page. That is free marketing to get connected to your ideal clients. A real connection means interaction. Facebook is a social medium platform; this means there must be a two ways interaction. You post something that must trigger a response from the other person. You want them to keep on watching your video, comment on your blogpost or like what you shared.

Learn with this blogpost how you can start the conversation with your ideal clients. A conversation that will lead to a call to action, make an appointment, a chat or even a purchase on your online Shopify hairstore or in a real store. .

Help, nobody reacts on your post!

We all have been there. You have something interesting to tell the whole world should know. You wrote a blogpost about the hair you sell, found a new hair supplier or saw something funny. You write some text, add a picture and press on the post button! Now wait and see!

After 5 minutes nothing, one hour later only one person noticed your post, but did not like it. The next day 40 people saw the post, but again no like, share or comment. How are you going to grow your Facebook Hair Business Page if nobody reacts?

You could ignore the fact nobody responds, because after all you like what you wrote. But the problem is, only when you post engaging hair stuff on your Facebook business page, your messages will reach more people. And only this way you get the right growth.

So, let’s see how we can start people to respond on your Facebook postings. You will read about what firms like buzzsumo discovered after analysing nearly 1 billion Facebook Postings. But also how you can analyse your own Facebook Hair Business Page.

Stop guessing why nobody reacts on your postings

Please, stop trying to guess why your Page about Hair Extensions is not performing that well. To improve the growth and interactions on your Business Page you need a strategy. Let’s call the strategy: “I can grow my Facebook Hair Business Page “.

The best combination for growth of your Facebook Business Page is to know:
– what in general works and
– to fine tune this using the data Facebook provides for your own Business Page.

Do not start posting content on Facebook to only grow your audience. That will not work unless you want an audience that follows you but will never be active on your page in the future. Better to attract followers that like the content you share and are eager to see you posting a new video or image.

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Facebook Insight learns you how to improve your postings

With your Facebook Business Page comes a free feature, Facebook insight. Here you can see how others interact with your Facebook Page, what they like, how many people did you reach. You can see for all your postings.

I recommend checking this every day. Use the information to improve your postings based upon the needs and behaviour of your own followers.

Ask your self questions if you see the results of your postings.
– what is the difference between the various postings,
– what can be the reason people like post A more then post B,
– or the other way around?
– also check the time of posting,
your audience might have a lot of hair styles and needs on their mind on Saturday afternoon for example. Make sure next time to post at that moment of the week.

To train yourself write down for every new posting what you think will happen in terms of reach, and interaction. If you see the actual results you can learn this to improve your own learning curve. Next time you can post content that is more aligned with your followers’ interest.

First see, then believe!

With this post I will take you by the hand to improve the engagement or interaction with your Business Page. I will use my own Facebook Business Page for How to Sell Hair Extensions as a test case. At the time I wrote this blogpost I have 2.939 followers.

Facebook Hair Business Page

Okay, you can say, more engagement will not completely lead to a higher number of followers. But if people like what they see on my Facebook Page, they will also more likely follow me. And number of followers is also a rather simple indicator to follow. You can follow this number of followers also, so you can see any time of the next coming weeks if the strategy works or not. If you want to see it works, I recommend following the strategy and my Facebook Business page. If you see it does not work, you can unfollow me. Deal?

Follow How to Sell Hair Extensions on Facebook

The first step of the strategy is to plan what kind of content your audience will like and interact with most. Remember, this interaction can be liking, commenting, sharing or watching.

Avoid spamming your followers and post as many content as possible. It is smarter to limit the number of postings but to deliver high quality content. The quality of the previous posted content you can see on your insight page of your Facebook Hair Business Page.

The order of the content with the highest engagement is:

– Video
– Question
– Photo
– Giveaway
– Links
– Coupons

This overview is very interesting. In many occasions people use the Facebook Business Page to lead people to interesting content on their website. But this overview tells us, a link is one of the least popular contents. If you still want a link to your blog or website, try to first post an image. 2 hours later edit the post and add the link to your blog.

If you want to know the ratio of the various type of postings, keep the following in mind:

70% video posts
20% image posts and
10% link post.

One engagement is not generating one deal

Marketeers understand it takes at least 7 moments of interaction between your marketing message and the ideal client seeing the message, before they will express their interest in your hair. This means you need to keep an eye on this number. The interactions can be in different forms, via your social media, your hair blog or website and direct messages or WhatsApp. Not the platform, but the number of interactions is important.

Video, Video and Video

For Facebook the content that leads to the highest engagement is video. And why not, because a video comes the closest to real life interaction between people. You can see what you hear and if there is a person to see on the video you can see the nonverbal reactions too. If people watch your video, you managed to make them stop doing whatever they were doing. Now they focus on your message about hair extensions. Video also ensures the highest level of comments or shares. When people watch your video, you made an emotional contact.

You do not need to record a new blockbuster; the optimal length of a Facebook video is between 3 and 5 minutes. With the highest number of viewers between 3:00 and 3:20 minutes. Make sure any CTA, like subscribe this channel or link to your website, is placed around this time, even if your video is longer. Avoid videos of 1 minute or less, that is too short for Facebook.

Do not forget to add a call to action for the viewers. After watching your video message, they will have the question: “Nice content, now what?”.

Why would people share your post

To have great content is one, but what if people like to share your message? This is free advertisement of your Facebook Hair Business Page. Every share is a potential new follower!

The New York times analysed why people share information online, and they learned people share:

to delight others with valuable & entertaining content

to identify and present ourselves to others,

to foster relationships,

for self-fulfilment,

for spreading the word about issues, products & brands.

In summary, you should teach your audience something useful, something that relates to a niche in which you are an expert and to do it in an enjoyable way. For this it is helpful to make a profile of your ideal client.

Do not only offer bundle deals

Use Facebook to entertain and educate your followers and interact with them. Do not only post a new bundle deal followed by another. Who will ever talk to their hairdresser again, if she only talks about another hair care product to buy?

Summary, what to do and not to do to grow your Facebook Hair Business Page?

– Create a I can grow my Facebook Hair Business Page strategy

o Do not spam your Facebook followers with a lot of content only to have more reach

o Only attract followers that like your content and look forward to seeing more

o Check your Facebook insight daily to see what works and what doesn’t

– Check if my strategy works and the number of followers grow, otherwise unfollow me

– Plan the type of content, video, image, question, link, giveaway

– Use the right mix: 70% video, 20% images and 10% links

– Plan to have at least 7 moments of contact with your audience

– Record video with a length between 3 and 5 minutes and a call to action at 3 minutes

– Do never forget a clear call to action, help your follower to make a next action

– Teach you audience something useful in an enjoyable way

– Do not only post offer bundle deals

– Do not only post offer bundle deals

– Yes, I know the previous line was the same as the other line about bundle deals, please do not only post bundle deals 😉

– Follow me on Facebook (example of a clear call to action)

Follow How to Sell Hair Extensions on Facebook
Where to source hair at favorable prices?

Where to source hair at favorable prices?

Oct 15, 2019 | Find Hair, Launch Your Web Store, Prepare for the Launch, WholeSale Companies

Where to source hair at favorable prices?

This week Kahagi from Kenya asked me where to source hair at favorable prices. The aim was to purchase the hair at conditions that allows women outside Nairobi to purchase gorgeous hair at a fair price.

What are the retail prices of hair in Kenya?

To answer the question, of where to find suppliers who offer hair at advantageous prices, we first must analyze what the price level is. The challenge with comparing the price of hair extensions or weaves is the quality element. You can compare the price in Ksh, but you do not know the quality. Except you first buy all the hair and test the hair after installment. But this is not really an option.

The various A grades will not help you either, it works to compare the hair of one single supplier, but you cannot compare these grades between different manufactures or suppliers. There is no hair police, so nobody checks if the A grades are a realistic reflection of the hair quality.

Today, I will only analyze the price of the hair based upon the price. Some stores do and some do not share their prices. For the purpose of this post I compared the prices of some products that seemed to be comparable.

Wholesale Braids
Hair Store Names
Be Your Own Boss in Kenya

What does the competition tell you?

I explained it was difficult to compare the hair of all the stores and re-sellers. But this does not indicate you have no figures you can use to estimate the price range for your hair. If you know these prices you will be able to start the calculation of what favorable prices you need.
For Kenya there are a lot of stores that publish the prices of hair, weaves and wigs on their website or Instagram account. I simply visited the sites and made a list of prices for Body Wave, Straight and Kinky, plus some wigs.
This exercise gave me for example the average retail price for body wave 16, 18 and 20 inches:

  • 16 inch, Ksh 9,000;
  • 18 inch, Ksh 9,800;
  • 20 inch, Ksh 10,800;

You can make a nice bundle deal out of this!
These prices come from stores that have a certain reputation already. From a marketing point of view, you could consider offering the hair for a lower price. Next to the price of the competition, you need to take into consideration other points of the service offering. What about the transport, the expenses to store and conditions to maintain a good hygiene around the hair? What kind of after sales do you offer, will you accept returns, or only exchanges.
All these factors you must consider if you set your retail price.

How to calculate your retail price

I have shared several posts with how to calculate your retail price. For example:

How much to markup Donna Bella Tape In extensions?
How to create a profitable pricing strategy for hair extensions

You can use this information to guide you to calculate your selling price.

Human Hair at one third of the retail price

I can offer a bundle of Body Wave for say, one third of the retail price. In other words, you will have nearly 70% to cover expenses, like shipping (say USD 30 for the first 3 kilo and USD 10 for every extra additional kilo) and payment. Add the other operational and marketing expenses and you could have room to or lower the retail price if needed given the market, or you could have a higher profit margin.
If you want to be a middleman and purchase the hair to re sell to other stores or salons. You will have to control you expenses and keep an eye on the market. You will have to share the margin with the reseller. Here you can obtain a higher margin by purchasing the hair at a lower price by buying more kilos.

So, you can source the hair with me, or I can help you to find a reliable source for the hair.
Leave a comment if you are interested in hair for, at least, one third of the retail prices given.

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