There were few magazine advertising spreads nor platforms, so there was no need to think about a communications budget. ![]() Before hair relaxing brands innately trusted that consumer demand would always remain high, so they barely advertised since products sold out on their own. At the moment, these hair relaxing brands are still finding success in Africa, but they’ve definitely lost their competitive advantage in European and American markets with the boom of the natural hair movement.Īnother major change lies in communication. If relaxers do come back in vogue, it won’t be for the same reasons : it won’t be to normalise your hair style or to find work or because kinky hair is considered “ugly”. The more we educate the youth on how to take care and love their hair, the less there’ll be a need for relaxers. For him it’s almost heretical to do that and I think this way of thinking has seeped into the newer generations. My 10 year old son doesn’t even know what hair relaxers are – when he sees old pictures of me with relaxed hair, he doesn’t understand and asks why I used to have my hair like that. One client asked me “Why don’t you relax your hair anymore?” It was so easy for them before. There was a point where panic reigned among the leading brands of that time because they didn’t know what to do anymore since women for the most part no longer wanted their hair relaxed. ![]() The smaller brands that took over are more nimble and agile and can thus respond to consumer demand for natural and clean ingredients and market changes quicker, which give them a leg up against bigger brands that used to lead the black beauty industry. Today, there are over 3000 black hair care brands that have popped up, that more or less do the same thing, so it has become an extremely competitive and fragmented marketplace. Twenty years ago, when there were only a couple of hair relaxing brands in the world, it was easier to generate billions of dollars per year. Even if most women today have embraced their natural hair, the natural hair care sector value does not equate hair relaxers’ market value. Beauty industry giants are now at a crossroad, either they will fully embrace natural hair care products or they wi ll have to think of new products that will fill the billion dollar void leftover from hair relaxers. ![]() The market is performing well overall because there is still a big demand, however it’s not doing as well as a couple years back when there was a real frenzy from consumers who were purchasing the latest products at the height of the natural hair movement. Overall, how is the black hair care market performing?
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