Hair Accessories
The entire female population of the planet regardless of race or culture is fascinated if not obsessed with their hair. Ok, ok so I am going to get into trouble for generalising, being sexist etc. but from a business point of view the statement may as well be correct. Whether it be little girls with baubles in their hair or Britney Spears shaving her head to make a statement hair is important (on the whole) to women.
The suggestion is that you buy hair accessories from one market and sell them in another, examples might include hair pieces, hair bands, elasticated bands etc. I am not suggesting dyes or other chemical processes as the potential for trouble seems to great to be worth it.
You may need to find a number of suppliers to ensure that you have masses of choice available for your customers. Profit margins may be healthy but the cost of these items is small, so you need to aim to sell a lot of them.
Marketing ideas include the following: -
Friends/Family
Party Planning
Ebay
Website
Shop
Whilst you will not sell sufficient quantities through your friends and family to make this worthwhile, you will at least get sufficient experience to discover whether this business is for you. You will understand about getting stock and can keep your range small until you are comfortable.
The next step might be to organise an event similar to an old style Tupperware party. Put on food and drinks and invite a bunch of friends, preferable with their daughters but be clear that it is with the purpose of showing them your stock, new stock, new price list etc. In other words have a clear reason for the event and make sure that the attendees understand. The group atmosphere will help you to sell a chunk of stock particularly as these tend to be low cost items. After 1 or 2 of these, start asking people if they would host for their friends and family if you cover the cost.
Ebay is less competitive than I would have thought for a simple search on <hair accessories> there are some 663 items. I would imagine that a dedicated poster could put up as many items as that with a week or so of concentrated work. Remember the key here is choice and your customers will browse until they find what they are looking for, or until something jumps out at them.
www.google.com is more competitive with 11.6 million hits on a search for <hair accessories>. What this means is that you will need to promote your site heavily to find customers rather than relying on search engines to point customers at you. If it makes you feel better the words <start business> have 691 million hits on Google but I manage to get about 70-80 visitors per day to my site after about 11 weeks of promoting online. You can also promote offline by advertising, hand out business cards; flyers etc and build this traffic further. Most importantly keep all your stock online in photo form so that your customers can see whether you have what they want before calling you, or coming round.
Before setting up a shop you may want to try selling your stock through other shops. Ultimately though as small stand in a shopping mall, or supermarket type location should be relatively cheap and allow you to sell a higher volume. You don¡¦t need to stand on the stall and can hire people to take care of the day to day management. It does take some time to get processes running smoothly though so be prepared to work hard in the first 3-6 months after opening.
Stock is straightforward to find, look at www.alibaba.com or www.globalsourcing.com to find and start conversations with suppliers. You can also search on Google or your usual search engine and look for suppliers in developing countries such as Vietnam, India, China, The Philippines, Indonesia, etc.
Don¡¦t be put off by numbers a thousand hairclips fit in a very small space, and your customers will not buy them 1 at a time.
The key to this is bulk sales. You may be able to make 30-50% profits or higher but on typical items that cell for cents rather than dollars this means your focus must be volume.