We last had a price increase in April 2020, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we held off increasing our prices until August 2020 to ensure that all salons, stylists, and customers could benefit from our previous pricing whilst they were getting back to work and rebuilding their businesses.
During this time, we’ve had several increases imposed on us by our factory partners due to the increase in costs associated with sourcing the hair, production, packaging, and delivery. We have, up until now, absorbed all these costs and these increases have not directly affected our customers, ensuring that they have had every opportunity to rebuild their business and offer the lowest possible price point for the highest quality product available.
Unfortunately, we are no longer able to absorb these costs due to the continued and large increases that we face on a monthly and quarterly basis.
These costs are mainly associated with negative impacts caused by the pandemic. To put this into perspective, there has been a low supply of raw hair available due to illness as well as the inability for our hair purchasing agents to travel and purchase the raw hair braids. We have also seen a significant increase in production costs due to the measures our production facilities have had to put in place for social distancing (and) testing, as well as using less factory workers over a longer period of time to complete the same level of work that they did previously. There have also been increases to both sea and air shipping due to the increase in demand for sea shipping and the unavailability of planes due to the decrease in demand due to lockdowns around the world. All these factors have caused significant cost increases that we can no longer absorb.
An example of this can be seen with sea shipping. In April 2020 it cost around £4,100 ($5,750) to ship a container by sea from China to the UK, in April 2021 this rose to over £12,400 ($17,350) for the same journey. This is an increase of over 200% in under 12 months.
Also since the beginning of the year the British Pound has grown stronger than the US Dollar. To help you understand better last year the exchange rate was $1.20 = £1.00, today's rate is $1.40 = £1.00 that is a 15% to 20% lost. We also absorbed this.
The biggest increases will happen with the longer length products due to these being low on supply and harder to source. If you think about it, hair that is sold at around 24″ in length has been growing for around 5 to 7 years, as this is a natural product, and not man made. Currently, demand is outweighing the supply that is available and the price must increase for the longer lengths due to the inaccessibility of them.
You’ll have probably noticed that many things that you use daily have gone up in price over the past 12 months or have even heard about it on the news. This is the unfortunate consequence and negative impacts of the pandemic and lockdowns that have occurred worldwide and doesn’t appear to be getting any better anytime soon.
Luckily, as we purchase in US Dollars, the increase is not as bad as it may have been due to the increase in strength of the GB Pound and the positive impact that it has had on the exchange rate over the past 12-18 months. However, this can also have a big impact negatively if it were to suddenly weaken and drop.
Although we see increases monthly that we try to absorb, we strive to offer the best quality product for the most affordable price that we can. We can’t promise that we won’t have to increase our prices again soon, but we can promise that we won’t compromise on the quality that you are used to and that we offer.
We hope that this gives you an insight into why we must increase prices and what variables impact the severity of the increase that we have, as well as what impacts us as a company behind the scenes that most of our customers are not aware of.
Our price increase will be effective as of 1st August 2021.
Click Here To Download The Price List