Hair Extension Supplier Guide: Remy Grades, Weft Types, Weight and Customs

Alan XiaoFounder, Sourcing Pioneer

· Updated October 9, 2026 · 24 min read

A hair extension price is built on three things: the grade of the hair, the weight of the bundle, and the construction of the weft. Change any one of them and the price moves more than the difference between suppliers ever will. This guide covers how hair is actually graded and traded, why the cuticle direction matters more than the label on the bag, how weight and length trade against each other, what the processing does that shows up three weeks later, and how the material you claim decides the customs code the shipment travels under.

1. What a Hair Extension Quotation Covers

A quotation for hair is a quotation for a raw material, not for a manufactured product. That single difference explains most of the confusion first-time buyers run into, because the price moves with whatever the hair cost that month rather than with a fixed bill of materials.

Hair is a traded commodity. It is bought by weight from collectors and agents, sorted, washed, processed and then bundled. When you ask a supplier for a price on 20-inch bundles, you are asking for a price on an amount of a material whose cost changed when the last lot was bought, which is why a quote can be valid for a week and not a quarter.

The hair itself

The largest line by far, and the one that moves. Priced by weight and by length, and the two are not independent — a longer bundle of the same weight is thinner, because the same mass is spread further.

The processing

Washing, sorting, treating and dyeing. Cheap processing is where a bundle that feels perfect in the bag turns into one that tangles after three washes, and it is invisible at the moment you buy.

The weft

Machine sewing, hand-tying, or bonding to a strip. This is skilled work and it is priced per piece rather than per gram, so a hand-tied weft can cost several times a machine weft on the same hair.

Attachment parts

Tape, clips, keratin bonds, micro-rings. Separate components with their own suppliers, and usually quoted as separate lines if they are quoted at all.

Labels and packaging

Your brand tag, the bundle band, the bag. Small money per unit and the fastest part of the order to change, so it is worth keeping separate so you can reorder quickly.

2. Remy, Non-Remy and Cuticle Direction

If you take one thing from this guide, take this: hair behaves well or badly depending on which way the cuticles point. Human hair strands have overlapping scales that lie in one direction, from root to tip. If every strand in a bundle points the same way, the surface is smooth, and the bundle stays smooth as it is washed and brushed. If the strands are mixed, or the cuticles have been stripped off, the scales interlock with each other like teeth, and the hair tangles into itself.

That is the whole mechanism behind every quality complaint you will ever receive about tangling, matting or shedding. It has almost nothing to do with the country the hair came from and almost everything to do with how it was handled.

What Remy actually means, and what it does not

Remy describes hair that has been kept in one direction with the cuticle intact. Non-Remy, sometimes sold as cuticle-stripped, has had the outer layer chemically removed so that the natural direction stops mattering, because there is no cuticle left to interlock.

Here is the part buyers rarely hear. Remy is not a regulated standard. No law defines how much of a bundle must be aligned for it to be called Remy, and there is no certificate that settles it. It is a trade word, and trade words are worth exactly what the person selling them means by them.

So do not treat Remy as a checkbox. Treat it as a claim that has to be tested, and test it the way the trade tests it. Take a few strands, hold them between finger and thumb, and run from root to tip, then tip to root. On aligned hair, one direction is smooth and the other grips slightly. On stripped or mixed hair, both directions feel the same, and neither is smooth. That difference is the whole thing, and no photograph can show it.

3. Where the Hair Comes From: Xuchang and the Origin Question

Almost every wig and extension sold anywhere starts its manufacturing life in Xuchang, a city in Henan province in central China. The city produces around 60% of the world's wigs, is home to more than 4,100 hair product companies, and employs roughly 300,000 people in the industry, according to reporting on the city's export trade, which also puts its 2024 hair product exports above $2 billion.

The useful thing to understand is that Xuchang is a processing hub, not a source of hair. The hair itself is collected elsewhere and brought there. Reporting from the city notes that the origin of the raw hair has shifted over time from the Chinese mainland toward India, Myanmar and Bangladesh on cost, and that even the largest wig manufacturer based there draws more than 60% of its human hair from India, as described in this report on the Xuchang hair industry.

Why the origin label on a bundle is a story, not a fact

This is where a lot of brand-building runs into trouble. Hair sold as Brazilian, Peruvian or Malaysian is a description of a texture and a set of handling properties, not necessarily of a farm. The trade uses those names to describe how the hair behaves, and the actual collection point can be somewhere else entirely.

Two consequences follow, and both are practical.

First, do not build a premium claim on a country name you cannot support. If you market Brazilian hair, you are making a claim about origin. Ask your supplier, in writing, where the hair in this specific lot was collected, and keep the answer. If they cannot tell you, the name is a marketing word and you should price and describe it as one.

Second, the origin question is also a customs question. Where goods are processed decides what the country of origin statement should say, and the wording is narrower than most suppliers assume — our origin marking guide walks through the accepted forms. When a supplier offers to print whichever country you prefer on the label, the correct answer is no.

What the raw hair costs

Premium human hair is not a cheap input, and it is worth knowing the scale before you judge a quotation as high. Reporting from Xuchang puts the top grade of human hair at up to 30,000 yuan per kilogram, as described in this report on the city's wig industry.

That number does not tell you what your bundle should cost, because the price depends on length, weight, grade and processing together, and the top grade is not what most commercial orders use. What it does tell you is why a quotation that looks suspiciously low is worth questioning rather than celebrating. When a price comes in well below everyone else, the saving is almost always in the grade, the weight, or the processing — and two of those three are invisible at the moment you accept it.

4. Weft Construction: Machine, Hand-Tied, Clip-In, Tape-In, Keratin

The weft is the strip that holds the bundle together. Ask which construction you are buying, because the same hair in two different wefts is two different products at two different prices, and the difference shows up in how the weft lies against the head and how long it lasts.

One practical point across all five: the attachment is a separate supply chain. The clips, tape and keratin tips usually come from a different supplier than the hair does, which means changing one does not change the other, and a delivery delay on a small component can hold up an order of finished pieces. Ask which parts are bought in-house and which are bought in, and build the schedule around the slowest one.

5. Length Against Weight: Why the Gram Is the Real Unit

Here is the relationship that trips up almost every first-time buyer. A bundle is sold by weight, and the hair inside it is sold by length. Those two are not independent, because the mass of a bundle is spread across however many strands it contains. Ask for longer hair at the same weight and you get fewer strands, which means a thinner bundle.

So "20 inch, 100 grams" and "24 inch, 100 grams" are not the same amount of hair. The second one is a measurably thinner bundle, and it will not cover the same area of a head. This is why a customer who orders the same weight in a longer length sometimes complains the bundle looks smaller, and why the complaint is correct rather than imagined.

Wet weight and dry weight

There is a second trap underneath the first. Hair is weighed either wet or dry, and wet hair is heavier. A supplier quoting wet weight can offer what looks like a heavier bundle for the same money, and the customer receives less hair than the number implies.

Fix this in one sentence in the specification: state the weight as dry weight, measured after drying, on a calibrated scale. Then check it yourself on arrival with a kitchen scale accurate to a gram. Weighing an incoming bundle takes a minute, and it is the fastest way to find out whether the specification is real.

How to write a bundle specification

• Length in inches, and state whether that is the length of the hair or the length including the weft. The difference is an inch or so, which is enough to matter on a short length.
• Weight in grams, dry, per bundle.
• Grade claim in plain words — cuticle intact and aligned, or cuticle removed — rather than a bare brand word.
• Weft type, named from the five above.
• Colour reference against a physical ring or a sealed sample, not a name.

Five lines. An order without them cannot be inspected, because there is nothing to inspect it against, and a dispute without them is one person's memory against another's. The measurement discipline is the same one that applies to any order — our first article inspection guide sets out the pattern of agreeing the numbers before production rather than after delivery.

6. Colour, Texture and the Processing That Fails Three Weeks Later

Almost all the difference between a bundle that lasts a year and one that tangles in a month is set before you ever see it, in the processing. It happens in the wash, the sorting room and the dye bath, and it is not visible in the bag.

Cuticle stripping, and why it is sometimes fine

Stripping the cuticle is a real technique, not automatically a cheat. Removing the outer layer makes the hair take dye evenly and removes the direction problem, which is why stripped hair is used in some cheap, heavily coloured products. The trouble is that removing the cuticle also removes the protection, so stripped hair needs to be coated to feel acceptable, and the coating is what washes out.

That is the mechanism behind the most common complaint in this trade. A bundle feels silky in the shop because it has been coated. Thirty days later, after several washes, the coating is gone, the unprotected hair is exposed, and it starts to mat. Nothing changed except that the thing making it feel good was temporary.

Colour: specify against a physical reference

Hair colour is described against shade systems and names that vary between suppliers, and natural hair is not a uniform colour to begin with. A shade called natural black by one factory can sit next to a visibly different natural black from another, and both are describing the truth.

The fix is simple and it is the same one that works for denim, leather and any other material with natural variation: approve a physical sample, seal it, date it, and keep a duplicate. Then check production against that sample under a consistent light. A colour name in a quotation is not a specification; a sealed bundle is.

Texture is a word, not a number

Straight, body wave, deep wave, curly — these are the trade's names for pattern families, and they are not standardised. Two suppliers can both send you a deep wave that looks nothing alike. If the pattern matters to your product, define it with something you can compare: send them a reference bundle, or ask for the pattern to be specified by the number of curves over a set length. It sounds fussy and it prevents a whole category of dispute.

7. Lace, Closures and Frontals for Wig Orders

If you are ordering wigs rather than bundles, the lace is where the product is won or lost. It decides how the hairline looks, how the cap breathes, and a large part of the price. Ask for it by name and by base material, because lace comes in several kinds and the names are used loosely.

Two checks matter on any wig order. First, check the lace against the skin tone it is meant for, on a real person or a head form, not held up to a window. Second, check the knots. Hand-tied knots that have not been bleached read as dark dots along the hairline, and that is the single defect most likely to come back as a complaint. Ask how the knots are handled before you approve the sample, and look at the hairline in daylight rather than in a lit room.

The caps, closures and lace usually come from specialist suppliers rather than the wig workshop, which means a wig order has more separate supply lines in it than a bundle order. Our factory audit guide covers how to map which stages a supplier runs itself and which it buys in, and that map is the thing that tells you where a delay will come from.

8. How to Test a Sample Before You Commit

Order a sample of the actual production hair, not a display bundle. Suppliers keep their best hair for samples, which is a sensible commercial habit and a real problem for you, so ask for the sample to be drawn from the lot you would be buying from. Then run five tests.

1. The direction test. Run a few strands between finger and thumb, root to tip, then tip to root. One direction should be smooth and the other should grip. Both the same means stripped or mixed.
2. The shed count. Comb ten wet strands from root to tip and count what comes away in the comb. Then do it in the opposite direction. A bundle that sheds going both ways is not aligned.
3. The wash test. Wash a small section with mild shampoo, dry it, and comb it again. This is the test that finds a coating, and it is the one most buyers skip because the sample felt perfect.
4. The weight check. Weigh the bundle dry on a scale accurate to a gram and compare it with the quotation. Do this on arrival of every batch, not just the sample.
5. The knot and lace check on wig orders — hairline in daylight, and the knots against the lace.

Run the same five on a production bundle when it arrives. Sampling tells you what the supplier can do; checking the delivery tells you what they actually did, and those are different questions. Our pre-shipment inspection guide covers how to write the inspection brief so it comes back with counts and weights rather than an opinion.

9. MOQ, Private Label and the Code the Shipment Travels Under

Minimum order quantities in this trade are set by the raw material lot and the sorting work, not by the packing line. Sorting hair into matched lengths and tones is hand work, and a supplier cannot justify opening a lot for a small run. The practical consequence is that your minimum multiplies per colour and per length, exactly as the wash multiplies the minimum on a denim order. Two lengths in one tone is a realistic first order; ten lengths in eight tones is a warehouse you have to pay for before you have a single customer.

On private labelling, most of the visible brand value is in three cheap components: the bundle band, the tag, and the bag. Our custom logo printing and finishing guide covers the options for each. They are the fastest part of the order to change and the part most likely to be reused across products, so it is worth getting them right once.

The classification decided by what the hair is made of

Wigs, false beards, eyebrows, eyelashes and switches, along with articles of human hair not elsewhere specified, sit under heading 6704 of the Harmonized System. The structure of that heading is the important part for a buyer, because the subheadings split by material rather than by finished product. As listed in this reference to heading 6704:

Read that table again with the grade discussion in mind, because the two connect. If the subheading is decided by whether the goods are synthetic, human hair or another material, then whatever the invoice says about the material is what determines the duty line the shipment travels in. A loose description is not a small error on a document. It files the goods as something they are not.

Two habits follow. First, make the invoice describe the goods exactly as they are — if a product is a synthetic blend with a human hair content, say so rather than calling the whole thing human hair. Second, check the duty rate for your own origin and destination combination rather than relying on a number someone quoted you, because rates are set by the pair of countries involved and change. Your freight forwarder or customs broker will confirm the ten-digit code and the rate for your specific case, and that confirmation belongs in the order file.

10. A Five-Step Sourcing Roadmap

1. Write the five-line specification. Length in inches, dry weight in grams, the grade claim in plain words, the weft type, and colour against a physical reference.
2. Sample from the production lot, and run all five tests. Direction, shed count, wash, weight, and the knots if it is a wig. Approve on the wash test, not on how it feels in the bag.
3. Narrow the range before you negotiate the price. One or two lengths in one or two tones. Every added colour and length multiplies the minimum, and the minimum is the real cost of starting.
4. Get the material statement in writing, per lot. It supports the grade claim you are charging for, and on the customs side it is the basis of the invoice description.
5. Weigh and test the first delivery. The first production batch is where a supplier's real grade shows up, and the scale is the fastest way to find out.

Everything in this guide sits inside our Beauty & Care Products sourcing hub, which collects the beauty, personal care and hair-product guides in one place.

11. Frequently Asked Questions