I am certain you have wondered what the reality is about the prices of wigs made from European human hair. From store to supermarket you will discover a great variation in prices – anywhere from 300 USD to as high as 10.000 USD (!). So permit me take you through each step of the practice of producing high quality handmade wigs, and show the exact costs.
Firstly, take the acquisition of hair. The price of hair for one wig (0,2 to 0,4 kg) varies from 30 to 40 USD throughout mainly Eastern European countries. There is little variation there, but an top additional price is incurred by high-quality wig-makers who collect hair in an appropriate and efficiently-controlled method. The best wig-makers visit hairdressers and keeping for the hair themselves, using no middleman. They do not buy hair from wholesalers because wholesalers blend hair, because it is so time-consuming to acquire successfully good hair. One simply has to find a girl between hairdresser’s clients that has beautiful, healthy hair and who wants it cut. The hairdresser can offer a free service to such a girl and actually pay her for her hair – and clearly both sides benefit from such a transaction. But this shows that, by its very nature, acquisition of fine-quality hair cannot be a easy great-scale automatic process. That explains why outside of Eastern Europe the charge of acquiring excellent quality hair is skyrocketing – not because the hair in itself is expensive, but because of its rarity. It is not easy to imagine a big-scale cheap procedure of acquiring high quality human hair in European countries.
Second, take the other materials used in making wigs. These are not expensive and their costs do not exceed 50 USD for a typical wig. These are the materials used to produce a cap. More and more wig-makers are now buying ready-made caps, so called “monofilament”, which are gaining reputation and their value is not very high.
Third, take the labor involved in making high quality handmade wigs. This is the main fee factor. Handmade wig needs at least a week to be created by an qualified specialist worker. It takes a week of hard work, with each hair being knitted to the cap with a very tiny crochet-needle otherwise glued with a special glue. In the example of long hair, the production time could be two to three weeks. Reliable wig-makers knit hair with a double-knot which makes the construction much more durable but needs any extra work-period. Depending on the type of wig, length of hair and type of cap the value of labor is from 150 to 300 USD.
Lastly, you cannot forget other typical manufacturing costs – investment’s amortization, management costs, taxes, insurances, rent, and profit. Altogether, the price of a handmade human hair wig made from European hair cannot be lower than 500-600 USD even for the shortest hair. There is no upper limit and it only depends on how much a client is willing to pay, but previous to you pay 1000 USD or more for your wig remember the real costs of its creation.
And now for a real mystery. Why are European human hair wigs not made in China where labor costs are much lower than in Poland, Russia, or the Czech Republic? The main reason is no fine quality European human hair available in big sufficient quantities to make profitable huge-scale production in China achievable. This is because wig-makers in Eastern European countries are buying all of the available hair for their own production. Surprising? – but that is how it is. And that is why largely of wigs created in China are made of Asian hair or blended hair commonly available on a wholesale market.
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