For some reason, hair has the people in a chokehold. I don’t know what that’s about, but for some reason, the babes want to sell hair extensions and lashes. They don’t think of selling anything else ever and that bothers me to my core. There are so many other things in this world to sell other than lashes and hair extensions. And I’m not anti either. I got on lashes as we speak. I will go pop in a ponytail as soon as this YouTube is over. But I just want you guys to diversify and expand your minds because there are so many other things that you can sell to make you way more money, and honestly, make it easier on you as a beginner dropshipper.
Focus on Larger Items When Dropshipping
Usually when you’re going into bulk inventory where you’re buying 500 of something and storing it in a warehouse and then selling it, you have to be cognizant of the size of the item that you’re selling, right? And hair extensions and lashes make a really good item for those who are short on warehouse space. Or maybe you don’t even have a warehouse and you’re holding these items in your home as a small business owner, as a side hustle, as a new entrepreneur. So something tiny like packs of lashes make perfect sense. Right? Or even something small and flat like boxes or packs of hair extensions make a lot of sense. But here’s the thing, you guys are drop shippers. I’m a drop shipper, meaning we never hold or package or ship our own inventory ever. We never go to the post office. We never go to USPS. We never buy a warehouse. So we do not have to worry about or think about in any way like packaging sizes or the size of the box of our inventory because it just doesn’t exist in our business model.
So with that, you can remove the limitation of feeling like I’ve got to sell something that is small enough to where I can keep it around my house or small enough to where I can buy a small storage unit as a startup business. So that’s no longer an issue. You can drop ship refrigerators if you want to. You can drop ship, I say this all the time, you could drop ship caskets if that’s your niche. So let’s not limit ourselves to these teeny tiny products. Let’s expand and think of larger items. And then the beauty of larger items is 98% of the time, the larger the item, the more expensive it is, the more money we can make, the more profit we can keep in our pocket. That’s why, or that’s one of the reasons why, hair just does not move me. Lashes don’t move me. Like let’s take advantage of the blessings of being a drop shipper.
Brand Loyalty Could be a Problem
Another thing I think about dropshipping, something like hair is the fact that hair extensions, as a person who’s bought hair extensions a million times, you usually stick to the same company. That’s the type of thing where people have a lot of brand loyalty. If you find a good extension brand and it blends with your hair really well and it doesn’t shed, or whatever the case may be, you’re going to buy from that brand over and over and over and over. The girls who really care about their hair being laid do not switch it up very much. There’s a lot of brand loyalty. What that means for new entrepreneurs is that it’s difficult to gain new customers sometimes in something that has such high brand loyalty. So why even go up against that hurdle with a new brand? Why not make things easier on yourself?
My entire platform and reason for doing what I do is about working smarter, not harder, and teaching people to work smarter, not harder. So it doesn’t mean it’s impossible, it doesn’t mean that there’s not room for competition. Of course there is. But my first thought, or for anybody in their first endeavor, I would hope that they would choose something that doesn’t have as high of a retention for brand loyalty as hair. It can work in your favor for sure if your line pops off and you get customers that they’re loyal to you. But is that always what happens fresh out the gate in a new business? No.
Lashes Have a Small Profit Margin
And let’s talk lashes. Now, lashes bug me for a whole different reason as far as dropshipping them goes. And that’s bottom line, profit. Profit. How much money can you make dropshipping eyelashes? How much do a pair of lashes sell for, $20 bucks at the most? I like lashes from the beauty supply store and they literally cost me a dollar. So I could be the wrong target audience for this, and I’m not ashamed to say that. But overall in general, online, a pair of lashes goes for no more than $10, $20, maybe $25 bucks, right? Strip lashes we’re talking about. So how much profit is in that sale? How much money are you walking away from? If the average box of lashes might be, I don’t know, $10 bucks, how much money are you making per sale? And this is the thing, there are so many other millions of products that you could sell as a drop shipper that will make you far more money per sale, far more money per transaction.
You don’t need to go platinum and make 500 sales a day. You could sell something where five sales a week is going to make you enough money where you could quit your job or sustain you as a side hustle. So I would shy away from lashes, I would keep you guys away from lashes for that reason. We want to profit first. We want to make the most amount of money in the least amount of time. And selling something with such a small profit margin like eyelashes is not going to get us where we want to go. Not for me, not for the Luxe Life Academy students.
Hair Extensions Could Have a High Return Rate
Another reason that I don’t love the idea of dropshipping hair is that hair extensions are usually a very, very high touch product. Meaning people want to physically put their hands on hair extensions before they buy them. Why? They want to feel the quality. They want to feel the texture, they want to see the color in the light versus just looking at it on a computer screen. They want to match up the color of their hair to the extensions. So when you have a high touch product like that, it’s not the best fit usually for something like dropshipping. Because a customer, no matter how incredible your website is, a customer still cannot physically touch it.
And then with something like hair extensions, let’s say the website is killer, they love the product, they order it, it gets to them and it doesn’t match their hair. I would imagine that something like hair extensions is going to have a really high rate of return because it does not match the person’s hair because they didn’t see it, they didn’t touch it with their own hands, they couldn’t hold it up to a mirror in order to purchase it. And as drop shippers, we want to avoid, I mean this is the smartest thing in the game, you always want to avoid products that have a really high return rate because you don’t have a warehouse, you don’t have some boxes stacks of the ceiling of your product. So where they returning this item to? Are you returning it to you as the individual? Are they returning it to your supplier or manufacturer? It just becomes a massive headache. So I teach my students to avoid items with a really high return rate just so that we can completely solve that problem and take that off the table. No matter what you sell, there’s going to be an error, or not an error, a margin for returns. But some things like this can be easily avoided and you will avoid it by not dropshipping hair.
So my question to you is, now that you know a little bit more about dropshipping for hair and eyelashes, what do you think? Are you going to still try to drop ship hair? Are you going to just climb that mountain? Or are you going to steer clear and pick products that are a better fit for the dropshipping business model? I really want to know. I hope that gave you some insight into why I am anti-dropshipping hair and lashes. And if you want to know more about the dropshipping business model, attend my free beginner’s dropshipping masterclass and learn exactly what dropshipping is, more ins and outs of the business and the five step process for you to get launched.
