Interview held with: Natasha Lombe, director Remy Hair Club at the Afro Hair &Beauty Show in London May 26th, 2014
Can you introduce RHC?
Remy Hair Club (RHC) is a London based boutique global wholesaler of Virgin Remy Hair Extensions. We have 15 years of Styling experience behind us and we love to share this knowledge about the hair business with our clients.
What do you offer?
RHC is offering specially tailored collections of Weave, Lace Closures, Handmade Clip-Ins and Handmade Wigs.
Why would somebody come to RHC?
We want to eliminate the supply of sub-standard and fake hair extensions. In the fifteen years we are active in the hair business, we have helped many women with the aftermath of hair extensions that shed, tangle and break within weeks of purchase. We are leading by example, meeting the highest standards, to help all our loyal women feel beautiful and confident.
Can you tell us how you keep the level of quality high?
Our team personally source and select every product to guarantee the very finest quality natural hair in all styles, textures, lengths and weft types: silky straight to coil curl; double machine weft to super thin hand weft. Our hair is procured from a variety of global sources with whom we have tested, strong relationships and quality control.
What kind of services do you offer as wholesale supplier?
We offer a wide variety of set block and mixed colours as standard. We can deliver directly to your door or, alternatively, provide storage for purchased goods and forwarding distribution from the UK where appropriate.
Is it possible to receive the hair without your brandname, so shops can resell your hair like it their own brand?
We always offer our clients the choice of receiving the goods in RHC branded or plain packaging.
If people want to put hair extensions for sale, how can they contact you?
VISIT RHC now!
Natasha Lombe
Director – Remy Hair Club
E: natasha@remyhairclub.com
Skype: remyhairclub
P: +44 (0)7958 467 558
The number of shops selling hair extensions online has grown substantially the last few years, not only thanks to the use of social media, but also thanks to celebrities promoting the use of hair extensions and hair blogs. So more and more people want to buy hair and thus a growing number of people want to sell hair. This also means the need for businesses who can sell hair wholesale has grown too.
Start to sell hair wholesale
You can decide to open a web shop for retail business, to benefit from this demand, but you can also consider supporting all these startups and re-sellers. In other words to sell hair wholesale. This support can be first of all to offer good quality hair extensions at a price that allows the re-sellers (stylists, salons and hair business web shops) to make their own margin too. Avoid looking for cheap hair only, better to analyze your market and to support the re-sellers with good quality hair.
You also have to look for a good source for your hair; of course you can buy hair from another hair extensions wholesaler. Here you have to find a right balance between the advantages of a wholesaler, located in your own country or a country that you can easily visit, that takes away the risk and expenses of buying abroad and the higher cost price.
Plan the cash you need to sell hair wholesale
In most cases you´ll have to pre-finance the operations and sales, so make sure you reserve enough money in your business plan for this. A good cash flow forecast, like in our business plan templates, will help you to survive any delay between the moment you send money to your source and the time you can finally sell hair to your own clients. Be sure you did your homework to investigate the need for a specific type of hair among your target clients first the faster you will earn back your investment and you can start to buy new hair again for your own hair extensions wholesale business!
You could also plan to visit some, for example, Asian countries to look for a good source for your hair. This you have to plan well ahead. Do not underestimate the importance of understanding the , you will miss the best deals if you do not communicate right. You will need people that know the local market. Not every hair business in Asia will be ready to sell hair abroad. Sometimes they are only focused on the local market or they do not have any experience in selling abroad. In this case you need to spend time and money to work on the relation first.
Help with your search for hair suppliers abroad
If you are planning to travel abroad, feel free to contact me, I have contacts in China and India who can help you with the arrangements.
Once you selected the hair extensions you want to sell you need to ensure to find a reliable hair extensions wholesaler. If possible it´s better to select more than one wholesale hair extensions supplier to make sure your business is not depending on one company.
You can search for a hair extensions wholesaler with presence near your location, this allows you to try and feel the hair extensions before you buy in larger quantities and it will help you to get a good commercial relation with the hair extensions wholesaler. This relation will avoid unpleasant surprises and might work in your benefit to obtain better prices or the latest products.
If you select a hair extensions wholesaler online, make sure you understand what is and what is not included in the price, try to receive a sample first and test the sample well before buying in larger quantities. But also try to find other people who bought previously from the company and check (via internet) the location the hair extensions wholesaler is located.
Check before you buy, if any sales tax or value added tax is due once you import hair extensions, if you can’t transfer these taxes to your clients, your profit margin will be impacted in a negative way.
Once you receive the hair extensions, always check them very well, weigh or count them and check if everything is in line with the order given to the hair extensions wholesaler. If something is wrong, you should contact immediately the wholesaler by phone and writing. Do not wait a couple of days. If possible only use a payment method that will allow you to cancel a transfer in case of fraud. But in case of fraud ensure you have enough written evidence to proof the abuse of your trust.
Okay, after doing your homework you made a short list of say ten hair extensions wholesales companies online, The chance you will find them near your place is rather small, so you will have ten links to a website, but then?
You need to be sure the hair extensions wholesaler you just found is reliable, because your own business will depend on being able to deliver a stable and good quality flow of hair extensions to your clients. And you do not want to spend all your money in buying samples that do not turn out to be the quality or texture you are looking for.
Market places
There are shops that use marketplaces to put their hair extensions for sale, like eBay, DHgate.com. Aliexpress or Alibaba.
The advantage of buying through a marketplace is that you can benefit from buyer’s protection rules that are implemented by the marketplace. If the marketplace wants to build up a good reputation it will apply strict rules for the merchants that sell their products through their marketplace.
But then of course you need also to investigate the reputation of the marketplace. On the internet you could look for reviews of other people on these marketplaces, or you could decide to buy only from the well-known marketplaces like eBay and Alibaba.
To help you to find out the reputation of the suppliers, most marketplaces grant their sellers stars or points based upon the positive feedback from previous deals. So, you can see how happy previous clients are about the shop you are thinking of buying from. The value of a star or point depends on the number of buyers who submitted their feedback on the shop. If there have been made only 100 deals it is easier to get a high positive feedback than in case there have been 10.000 deals. So some marketplace take into account the number of feedbacks received. So buy only from shops with a high rating combined with a high number of deals.
Most marketplaces allow PayPal as payment system, so you can benefit from extra protection, because in case the products are not in line with your expectations you can return them or at least make sure your payment will be returned. Looking for a wholesale hair extensions supplier, we will help you.
A returning question on our email consult is what is the level of inventory I should keep? Of course you do not want to put all your money in your stock. No problem if you have a high turnover rate (for example what you purchased yesterday is sold today) but it can kill your business and passion, if your money is piled up in beautiful hair extensions, but nobody is buying. You do not want to feel like Scrooge McDuck in a warehouse full of hair, do you?
How to calculate your minimum level of stock
To calculate how much inventory you need, you have to analyze a couple of things. First of all how are the delivery conditions of your supplier? In case they offer next day delivery, you can afford to keep a low inventory. But do they always have all the required textures or inches available? If this is not the case you could decide to find a second supplier or to keep extra inventory for these specific extensions.
If your supplier needs more days or even weeks before they deliver, you need to have some stock in the house in case your clients want to purchase the hair. But how much? For this you need to develop a crystal ball over time, you need to predict future orders! Easier said than done? Not easy but it can be done!
How to predict future orders
There are three things you need to develop to have the right insight to predict the level of inventory needed.
First of all, make sure you stay in contact with your clients, in your shop but also through social media. Activate discussions and analyze how they respond on the postings with new pictures of hair. Organize events and make sure at the end of the event you know what they are looking for and might be interested to buy a next time.
Next to this keep good track of your sales, this will help you to discover the most popular items for your clients, okay it is looking backwards, so not really a crystal ball, but it will tell you which items in origin, texture or lengths are the most popular ones.
Finally use analytical tools like Google Analytics or Facebook to analyze the visits to your website, what items attracts the attention of your visitors, how much time do they spend on checking the different hair you are offering. And why don´t you start to write a blog or some postings about a specific type of extensions and see how the people will respond. Do they like it and comment a lot, it does not mean they will actually buy it, but it gives you insight in what item is more popular or could become more popular.
Keep your focus
And do you really need to sell everything that is available on the hair extensions market? If you focus on some specific extensions you can become the expert and distinguish yourself from the others even from big shops that do sell everything. This will also reduce the items you need to keep in stock. See also our post on the right number of extensions to keep at hand.
