The fake beauty that has won rich and poor women’s love and cash

Long hair, says the Good Book, is a woman’s crowning glory.

And so, women in Kenya, poor and rich alike, have hived off from their monthly budgets billions of shillings to pursue this glory.

And just when the sun is shyly peering over the distant Eastern skyline, hundreds of women have already gathered at Korogocho Market, a sprawling slum within Nairobi’s low-end suburb of Korogocho. On either side of the road that cuts through Soko Mjinga market are makeshift salons.

Wanjiru is a hair-stylist in one of these salons. And like dozens of others here, she charges on average, Sh200 for every hair extension she beautifully embroiders on a customer’s head scavenged from Dandora dumpsite.

And the ‘lucrative’ Sh200 is inclusive of her trouble of getting it dusted, soaked in hot water and, at times, getting it perfumed.

So, by the time the sun sets behind the mountain peaks in the West, most of Wanjiru’s customers will march back home with their heads high and flashing with a glamorous halo of a new hairstyle.

They won’t care the weaves or braids or wigs on their heads were scraped from the filth of Dandora dumpsite.

The glory makes up for all the grime. It is a worthy ‘investment’ for Wanjiru’s clients who, although they toil to put food on the table, have made it a ritual to always look good.

As the adage goes, a woman is not only as good as her hair but her hair also somehow opens the doors.

“It opens the door to that interview, that boyfriend, husband or sponsor.  But even more important, that respect among her peers,” says the Marketing Head, Africa Hair at Godrej Consumer Group, Ms Ruth Mwangangi.

The hair sector is a multi-billion dollar industry whose charm has spread in some of the unlikeliest places of Kenya including the slums of Korogocho, Dandora among others within Nairobi and across the country. 

Georgina Kirungo, the owner and founder of Nywele Creative which deals in imported human hair, known as virgin hair within beauty circles, has a different set of clients. Those who can afford have to fork out between Sh11,000 and Sh400,000 for a piece of virgin hair. Her clients are entrepreneurs, senior Government officials, and TV presenters including other celebrities.

Her stores are in high-end malls such as Garden City along Thika Super-Highway, The Hub in Karen, Two Rivers along Limuru Road and Westlands.

She also has a shop at Green House Plaza along Ngong Road, Nairobi. “My clients are looking for a quality that you can’t put a price on,” says Kirungo.

Because natural hair that is well sourced, accessible, easily styled and durable is like an attic to her clientele, a piece of art to be cherished.

But, just as Wanjiru’s used hair, it is simply a crowning glory to the user. Both Kirungo and Wanjiru have tapped into the multi-billion dollar shillings hair global hair care industry driven by an overzealous pursuit of the Bible’s crowning glory.

In Kenya, an envious boom in the hair care industry has in recent times seen increased activities.

Last week, Darling brand, majority-owned by Indian conglomerate Godrej Consumer Group relaunched its Abuja hair extension brand in a move aimed at boosting sales in a highly competitive market.

Building schools

However, the synthetic hair extension market in Kenya is estimated to be worth Sh25 billion, about the same amount of money Jubilee Government has spent on building schools, hospitals, and offices in the last four years.

“For ten years, we had not done anything to rejuvenate our products. And yet younger girls are getting exposed to new global products from around the world, particularly from the United States and West Africa,” explained Mwangangi.

“We wanted to fortify our lead in the market,” added Mwangangi whose employer Godrej in March, acquired an additional 39 per cent stake in the makers of Darling brand, Style Industries, to complete the take-over of Kenya’s largest manufacturer of synthetic hair.

Besides Kenya, Darling brand is in 14 other African countries including South Africa and Nigeria which, in total, earn Godrej $200 million (Sh21 billion) in revenue sales annually.

The African hair extension market is estimated to be worth $619 billion (Sh62 trillion), compared to Kenya’s gross domestic product (GDP) of Sh7.2 trillion, or the total volume of goods and services Kenya produced in 2016. 

So big is the synthetic hair market in Africa that Benin’s third largest import in 2015 was fake hair, valued at about Sh39.4 billion. Although most of it was re-exports to Nigeria, it was more than what the West African country spent on healthcare in the same year. 

Synthetic hair has been ubiquitous in Kenya, mainly due to cheap imports of the product pouring in from China, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

In 2015, Kenya imported fake hair worth Sh3 billion, a figure that has certainly gone up. Feeling the heat, Darling which employs about 5,000 workers in its five plants in Kenya, re-engineered the manufacturing process of its flagship product, Abuja, in a move aimed at making it cheaper, and perhaps also winning Wanjiru’s customer in the process.

Even as firms up the ante in a competitive environment, Darling has had to fight off speculation that it was exiting the Kenyan market.  “I don’t know where that (rumours of closure) came from. We are just re-engineering the normal process,” reckoned Mwangangi.

And it is not like human hair has not been competitive. Denmark-based hair extension retailer, Beauty Click, early last year opened its first online store in the country.

The retailer which announced that it had partnered with over 450 hair stylists who also doubled up as its agents, is banking on the increasing number of the middle class with more disposable income and the emergence of a stylish modern woman to grow its profit line.  

In the same week that Darling relaunched its flagship brand, US Embassy brokered a trade deal between New York City-based Shea Moisture by Sundial Brands LLC and Kenya’s Lintons Beauty. The latter will be Shea Moisture’s official distributor of its natural hair products in the country.

Shea Moisture’s products include shampoos, pure oils, stylers, hair fragrance, conditioners etc.

“In Kenya, women are embracing their natural beauty in numbers not seen before,” says Raja Kaul, chief operating officer and head of emerging markets Africa at Sundial Brands.

Shea Moisture and other natural hair products are simply tapping into what Kaul calls “indigenous movement” that is gradually taking root in Kenya, with the Naturaliste leading the natural hair vanguard.

Although the hair product is such a massive industry with Kenyans splashing over Sh10 billion on hair-care products in 2014 as salon sales went up by eight per cent, there have been pronounced activities in natural hair products in recent times compared to other segments of hair products.

In March, France’s consumer group L’Oreal launched its own natural hair products, Au Naturale, as women quickly develop a taste for natural hair care just as a lot of people are moving towards organic foods.

The General Manager for Lintons Beauty Dr Joyce Gikunda, a pharmacist by profession, says the move is informed by the need for women to empower themselves without tinkering with their well-being.

Dr Gikunda observes that women have moved on from yesteryears when they could perforate iron tins, put charcoal embers in them and use it to relax their hair, a ritual that got popular during the festive season.

It was risky, but what followed the era of chemicals was not better either as women grappled with hairline loss due to acerbic effects of the products. “They spent so much money running to the doctor to get treated,” says Dr Gikunda.

Hair product manufacturers have, as a result, been burning midnight oil to come up with natural hair products that will remedy this. “Culturally, a woman’s hair is her crown,” says Dr Gikunda.

A woman whose hair is intact is more confident, concentrates on the economy, takes care of her family, and is successful. In the lucrative thriving hair industry, there have been other mergers and acquisitions.

In 2013, France’s leading cosmetic provider, L’Oreal, acquired the health and beauty division of Kenya’s largest manufacturer of personal care and beauty products Interconsumer Products, founded by Paul Kinuthia. The deal was estimated at Sh15 billion.

Among the products that L’Oreal inherited from Kinuthia’s company included hair care products such as Shampoos, Hair gels and relaxers.

L’Oreal which was reported to have increased sales to 40 million units a year after the acquisition, compared to two million units a year before, controlled about 28 per cent of hair care market in 2016, according to a report by Euromonitor International.

The French company is the second largest player in the hair care industry behind Chris Kirubi’s Haco Tiger Brands which controlled 38 per cent of the hair care market. Haco Tigers’ hair care products include Miadi, TCB, Motions and the new Black Silk for Afro hair which was unveiled in June 2017.

The third largest hair care producer is PZ Cussons East Africa Ltd, the manufacturers of Venus hair products.

In 2016, Haco Tiger Brands sales to Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Congo rose by 53 per cent, with the East African unit managing a turnover of Sh7.2 billion in the year under review - an increase of 26 per cent compared to 2015.

Flame Tree Group, currently listed under Nairobi Security Exchange’s  Growth and Enterprise Market Segment, has also been on an acquisition spree in the hair care industry.

It recently acquired a local start-up Suzie Beauty, months after buying Miss Africa, Black Angel and Beauty Plus hair products. Godrej, in December last year added to its ever-expanding African hair-care products collection.

It acquired Charm Industries, manufacturers of Aliyana brand of hair care products, as it sought to tighten its grip on Africa’s billion-dollar shillings hair care industry.

The pursuit for the crowning glory is not about to stop, especially with the emergence of the millennials, a group of unpredictable consumers born between the mid-1990s and early 2000s who have threatened to rewrite the rules of almost everything.

It is going to be difficult for players in the hair industry to predict how the millennials want to style their hair.

Do they want human hair as one sold by Nywele Creative or will they be okay with dry hair as Darling’s?

Or do they just want their hair as natural as they were born with, and hence buy the so-called natural hair products?

“With the Millennials coming of age, the industry will explode. And the rate of innovation will also explode. In the synthetic fibre, people will use such things as wool fibre,” explains Mwangangi, noting that women are getting more expressive.

And with disposable income expected to soar, as tastes become more personalised, lots of these hair extensions will find their way to Dandora or any city dumpsite, ensuring that every woman, irrespective of her income levels, does not have, as the Americans put it, “a bad hair day,” or simply, a bad day.