Whether it’s the variety of wigs you see in a high-end wig shop in Beijing or wigs worn on American or African heads, half of them come from Xuchang, Henan Province. In Xuchang,wigs are a centuries-old business and a typical example of the industry’s transition from agglomeration. Here,wig inspection is popular to see in Xuchang.Because of the production of wig products an average of 40,000 sets of global sales per day, the annual turnover of 1.5 billion dollars. On average, every two seconds, a wig is purchased and enters global circulation.
Behind the Wig Fashion
With animation and fashion becoming more and more popular, the wig industry has been accepted by more and more people.Consumers do not know the raw materials for the wigs in their hands may come from thousands of miles away in India, or it may be the result of nearly three weeks of work by more than a dozen people from rural workshops to factory assembly lines in Xuchang,Henan Province.Xuchang wig inspection company found that there are more than 50 procedures for the hand-made wigs. The most complicated procedure is hooking process, a needle hooking two or three hair, a wig takes 10,000 to 20,000 stitches.So it takes three weeks for a skilled knitter to finish.
The other type is machine hair weaving, which is generally produced in batch and inexpensive, but the authenticity is not ideal. The wig is heavy and poor in air permeability, which easily blocks hair follicles and makes them knotted easily. If the product inspected by CLI is woven hair, besides wearing check,it is more important to check the softness of wig to ensure that the product meets the requirements before shipment.
The production of wigs is not imagined to be similar to the production of arts and crafts scene, and there is no high-end feeling at the scene. In Xuchang of Henan province, the common sight is bags of woven bags of hair piled up on the roadside like building materials.
Recycling and sorting is the first step in the wig industry and the starting point of the development of Xuchang wig industry. The history of “hair collection” in Xuchang can be traced back to the late of Qing Dynasty. According to the local old man’s description, the earliest to make costumes, beards and other props for for some Beijing opera troupes. Then it began to develop gradually and almost every household was running a wig business. According to the data released by Xuchang Municipal Bureau of Commerce, by 2017, Xuchang has more than 240 enterprises engaged in hair products production, import and export, more than 300,000 employees who rely on wigs to make a living. The number of exported wigs can account for 50% of the world wig market, which has also derived from Xuchang wig inspection.
However, prosperity seems to be becoming history. Many bosses said that the wig industry is shrinking and transforming due to the rising cost of labor and raw materials in the past two years, and the number of Xuchang wig inspection is also gradually decreasing. Wig is a highly dependent on manual work, even in modern factories, many processes can only be completed manually. For example, in the last “high needle” process, the wig that has been molded is connected with the hair cover. This process cannot tolerate any deviation. The average time per processing a wig is 20 minutes. And the whole process must be reworked if the turn of the high needle machine is wrong. Therefore, during the pre-shipment inspection CLI provided, the inspector will focus on checking the sparseness of the hair, no hair loss is allowed, and the color of the mechanism line is consistent with the color of the hair.
If rising labor price is still an inevitable trend of economic development, another great dilemma facing the wig industry is that the raw material of high-end wig, high-quality human hair, is becoming increasingly scarce and expensive when enterprises try to enter the high-end wig field.
Collection of hair is getting harder
In the hair market, buyers and sellers are smart. Some sellers knew that too short hair could not be sold at a high price, so they mixed it with long hair and declared that “you could not pick and choose”. However, the smart buyer carries a ruler and a knife with him, since the price for each inch of hair is very different. However, if the knife scrapes off a layer of oily substance on the surface of the hair, it means that the hair has been treated with oil, which will also lead to a sharp drop in the price. This method of checking the quality of hair is also applicable to Xuchang wig inspection. And only for real human hair, so as to judge the cost of raw materials.
When the quality of hair in China deteriorates and more and more women begin to cut their hair short, these businessmen who do hair collection turn to foreign countries. Compared with domestic, foreign hair is generally 3~5 dollars cheaper per kilogram. However, the import of human hair was considered as “foreign junk” by the Chinese customs. The customs requirement for human hair import was to import it after finishing rough machining abroad, so most of the large wig enterprises chose to invest in overseas rough machining factories. Since then, the business of collecting hair has become more and more difficult to do. When Xuchang wig inspection of the middle and low end wigs, those basically are made of synthetic fibers, while the wigs made of chemical fiber have poor fidelity and are easy to react with scalp. The more times like this, the more CLI inspection needs to take each order seriously, Avoid Superficial Inspection, and help buyers to buy real wigs, thus obtaining consumers’ approval.
Two Major International Markets
In addition to the high price of raw materials, the competition brought about by the popularity of e-commerce in the past two years has also continuously compressed the profit margin of the whole wig industry. Originally wigs were an industry with high profit margins, especially in mature markets such as developed countries in Europe and the United States. Channel construction is equivalent to providing a set of brand and technical barriers for products and can also guarantee a certain premium. However, with the popularity of e-commerce, this set of barriers was quickly broken down.
Black women are the absolute main consumers of wigs. At present, the world’s largest market, the United States, is about 4.324 billion US dollars, while the size of the African market, the second largest market, is about 3.159 billion US dollars, both are accounting for more than 60% of the wig consumption market.And the clients of Xuchang wig inspection are mostly from Africa and the United States. Therefore, 83% of Xuchang’s enterprises have only export business, which is totally unrelated to the domestic market.
These two markets also have different needs for wig quality. With the different requirements, CLI inspection has formulated different inspection schemes to serve importers in the two markets. For example, for real hair inspection, depending on the hairstyle, whether the length is the same and whether it is not easy to break hair; For chemical fiber hair inspection, laboratory tests are required to check the moisture regain and whether it is naturally fluffy and elastic in appearance.
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