Brehettes, the haircare game

[Snoopy Loops]

So a home girl and I were discussing how black hair care supply chains and distribution are controlled by Asians

The idea of a marketplace where anyone can sell hair products came up. Like an Etsy dedicated to hair care.

As an IT breh, my head wheels started turning. On one hand every hair dresser out there has their own shop and it’s kinda easy to setup a Shopify store. On the other, wouldn’t it be nice to have a centralized platform to buy hair products

Other than major e-commerce platforms like Amazon, eBay etc, one that piqued my interest was Mayvenn hair, where they sell hair and connect people with stylists. I’m not entirely sure if Mayvenn has inventory or not, but they seem to market the hair as their brand so it’s seems like affiliate marketing packaged with stylist pairing feature.

The stylist pairing bit is a great idea.

To piggy back of the idea, if a seller is a stylist, the buyer has the option of booking an appointment with the stylist for the accompanying services. If the seller wasn’t a stylist, the buyer just buys the hair product like a normal transaction.

Tbh I have no idea about the ins and outs of haircare game. Y’all just show up looking good .

Was hoping if y’all could put me on game, seeing it’s the Salon after all. I’m open y’all trashing the idea. No qualms

 

[brandy]

What are you asking? I'm confused.

 

[Pseudonym]

Unless these products the women are selling are their own or a discounted price for a well known brand, I don’t think it would catch on.

The reason I say that is because when new products and brands come out it takes a while for it to be the new staple in every woman’s product line. In order for it to get to that point, there will have to be a big marketing campaign with reviews, and photos. It takes awhile to build trust with something new.

If you’re talking about buying regular products that are already available to me on Amazon or my local beauty supply store, I don’t see why I would go to an unknown website unless I was getting a big discount. Otherwise, I’d just continue to buy from the store.

 

[Rawtid]

I have to agree with the others, I don't think your idea would work.

You made a good point at the beginning of your post, which I feel is a better avenue for "us" to break into and that's wholesaling. If we could create a black hair network and pool money, we could get a foothold into the wholesale market and have more control over the products we sell to one another, along with an easier avenue for black product makers to get on. I don't feel we need to take over the wholesaling hair market (although it would be nice), but get our own corner and supply to our own.

From an IT perspective, I feel any application, database, dashboard, website etc that that highlights black, local hair services and products is good, but again saturated. I do like the idea of partnering products with stylists though, but most women aren't trustworthy enough to go to a rando stylist, imo. I know I wouldn't. Again, I think partnering and ensuring information remains accurate for one platform is a better use of time and information.

I think a lot can be learned from how larger beauty corporations utilize IT. If you can get scale some of those operations down, I think there are a lot of opportunities that can be created on a small business scale. For example, creating an inventory software specific to black hair care...things like categorizing products by hair type, use (deep conditioning, clarifying, etc), hair that's been pre-rinsed, or other categories other races don't care about.