Tanzanian merchants try wigs at Xuchang hair expo mall in Xuchang, Henan province, on June 2. WANG YONGTAO/XINHUA
A large share of the world's makeup brushes and wigs have origins located far from the fashion capitals where they are sold.
Local companies in Luyi, a county in Central China's Henan province, supply more than 85 percent of the world's artificial makeup brush fiber materials and account for over 90 percent of China's makeup brush exports. In the nearby city of Xuchang, at least six out of every 10 wigs sold globally are made by a cluster of more than 4,000 related companies.
Together, these two places in Henan show how inland manufacturing hubs in China are seeking a bigger share of the global beauty trade, moving from raw materials and contract manufacturing into brands, patents, overseas warehouses and direct online sales.
The roots of this success and expansion into new areas go back decades.
Luyi's makeup brush industry started in the late 1970s, when local villagers found export value in sheep tail hair. For years, companies there bought and processed hair, selling semifinished goods or making products for foreign labels.
Xuchang's hair trade, meanwhile, has even deeper roots. Local records trace it back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when residents traded needles and thread for human hair and made stage beards and headpieces. By the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), local merchants were exporting processed hair to Europe via partnerships with German traders.
In both places, scale came before brands. The industrial know-how was local, but much of the consumer-facing value was not. This gap is now what local companies are trying to close.
Luyi moved first through industrial policy. In 2016, the county launched a program to draw back entrepreneurs who had made their way to coastal trading hubs, pairing a new makeup brush industrial park with rent-free factory space, subsidized loans, a provincial quality inspection center and a cross-border e-commerce incubator.
One returnee was Huang Chunjie, chairman of Dias, a company specializing in makeup tools. After years of trading makeup-brush materials for Japanese and Korean clients in Yiwu in East China's Zhejiang province, which hosts the world's largest wholesale market for small commodities, Huang returned to Luyi in 2016 and moved up the chain: from raw-material sales and contract manufacturing to his own brand of mid — to high-end makeup brushes and beauty sponges for overseas markets.
This move gave Dias more than a label, it changed how the company sold. The firm has now built direct sales channels in Europe and set up an overseas warehouse in Germany. For urgent orders, China-Europe freight trains can get products from Luyi to European customers in as little as 20 days, about half the time required by traditional sea shipping. Dias' annual output value has topped 70 million yuan ($10.35 million), with foreign trade contributing more than 70 percent.
Luyi currently has over 1,000 related business entities, a local supply-chain matching rate of more than 95 percent and annual production of 150 million sets of high-end makeup brushes. Local companies sell through trade fairs, bulk sea shipments, China-Europe freight trains and platforms including Alibaba, Amazon and TikTok.
Xuchang has followed a different route up the value chain. Its advantage lies less in industrial-park policy than in materials technology, skilled labor and the ability to turn a centuries-old hair trade into a modern export cluster.
For years, Xuchang's hair-products industry had scale but limited leverage. High-end hair fibers were largely imported and many local producers worked for foreign labels. The breakthrough came as companies led by Rebecca, the first listed company in China's hair-products industry, developed multi-functional hair fibers and filled a domestic technology gap in high-grade human-hair-like fibers.
"From relying on imports to mastering core materials, companies have gained more pricing room," said Chen Yong, an administrative manager at Rebecca.
The advantage is not only in materials. Xuchang has more than 4,000 wig-related companies, directly supports nearly 300,000 jobs and produces almost 3,000 varieties of hair products. In Rebecca's workshops, a hand-woven wig can take more than a day to complete, with some requiring over 10,000 stitches.
Such craftsmanship is part of what makes the cluster hard to replicate, said Tian Liangjun, vice-president of Xuchang's hair products association. "Control over raw materials, accumulated craftsmanship and technological catchup have together given Xuchang a unique position in the global wig supply chain," Tian explained.
