Why Are Asians Dominant in The Black Hair Care Industry?

How is this happening?

Did you know that the black hair care is a billion dollar industry, yes, it is a industry as large as Proctor and Gamble, L’Oreal and Alberto-Culver. Despite the natural hair care movement with many black women who have been front runners and creators of the movement.  Black women entrepreneurs are being kept out from owning beauty supply stores.

Go to your urban city beauty supply stores and you will see that these stores have Asian employees and are owned by Asians.  In spite of black women having more knowledgeable about their own hair and what products should be used on their own hair than Koreans, they still remain the consumer and not the owner.

How were they able to move their businesses into black neighborhoods in America?  The wig industry was a lucrative business in the 1960’s and with the help of Yung Ho Chang working with the Vice Director of the Korean Trade Promotion in the U.S.A between 1965-1978 his company exported $100 million dollars of wigs.

Then the U.S.A came in and put a ban on Chinese hair so that made the market lucrative for the Koreans.  With that in place Koreans were able to have monopoly on the black hair care industry.  Now, where does this stand with black entrepreneur women?  The Koreans will not sell to anyone unless they are Korean and they will not distribute your products either, which leaves the Black entrepreneur left out and frustrated.   Now 50 years later, those wig stores are fully equipped hair and beauty supply stores.  With their top selling items being weaves and extensions and now they are the main supplier of the hair care industry for blacks.

There are more than 9,000 Korean beauty supply stores serving a billion dollar hair care market for black hair, However, whites also buy wigs and weaves, but they go to white hair beauty supply stores like (Sally’s) to get their products.  Koreans also control the manufacturing, distributing and selling of the beauty supply stores for the black hair care market too.

What can we do to tap into this industry?  We need to get black entrepreneur’s to set up businesses beside Korean stores in the black neighborhoods.  For every Korean store there needs to be a black owned store and a boycott of Korean products because they should be giving the black community 20% of their revenue back into the communities.