And whats so unbelievable about this stat?
A U$500 billion market then means the average person spends about U$240 per year on hair care. Which is ridiculously high.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-break-down-the-racial-demog...
Black women's hair appointments are more expensive; many hair salons charge a premium. Plus they use a lot of products and elixirs to change the nature of their hair. Plus, many of them wear a wig-like accessory, often of real human hair, every single day. The process of 'weaving' that into their natural hair can cost hundreds or even thousands, at the high end.
Source: black friend in college wrote an essay about this for a journal I was editing at the time, plus, common knowledge. There are some interesting cultural questions about how in North American society, natural black hair is deemed unacceptable, and this has generally been internalized by black women. If you choose to just be natural (as my friend did) you get a lot of flak from other black women.
I don't know if you can get this to work out to $500B; other industry numbers I could find are like $10B, which would be about $50/month for every black woman in the USA.
I have to disagree here. There has been a 'natural hair' movement circulating through the black female community for some time now[1]. I'm not sure if it's because the dangers of chemically manipulating hair have become more prominent or other factors, but black women in my circle (which includes high school, college aged, middle aged, and 'professional age') have all been transitioning to a more natural style and it's a very well embraced trend.
My girlfriend has been natural for a few years now and while it is harder to maintain she's told me that she will never go back.
Source (anecdata of course): A black man.
You've basically identified the source of a "problem" that shouldn't even exist to begin with: an inferiority complex.
It used to be that women of African descent would sport plaits, Jheri curls (80s), Afro (70s) etc. These were styles that rarely required the use of hair attachments or wigs. Wigs used to be for masking hair loss ...
She's of course at one end of the spectrum, but $240 on average a year doesn't surprise me that much.
You're probably talking about an American (or a Brit or a French person? Someone in the developed world) who's at least lower-middle-class. Consider someone in an emerging country. For the average Brazilian or Colombian, a U$1000 weave would be far too expensive. And the vast majority of the target population is living in Africa and is much poorer than the average Brazilian.
FWIW, I don't see anything wrong with the startup. I just making a back of envelope calculation that shows the market estimate is BS.