Answer 5 questions about your niche, budget, channel, and city. Inches builds you a personalized launch plan: which supplier, what to charge, your break-even, and 5 local salons to pitch.
See what’s in Pro →The wizard takes five inputs — niche (raw Indian, Brazilian, wigs, closures, synthetic, or mixed), budget, sales channel (Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, local salons, or social), your city and state, and how much minimum-order-quantity pressure you can absorb. It then scores every supplier in our documented directory against those inputs and picks the best match plus a runner-up, so you have a fallback if the first quote disappoints.
The plan itself covers the numbers a first order lives or dies on: how many units your budget buys at the supplier’s wholesale price, the typical retail range for your niche and channel, profit per bundle, and how many sales you need to break even. If you gave us a state, it also pulls real salons there from our leads directory and drafts an outreach message you can send as-is.
The channel you pick sets the retail range the plan prices against — Brazilian body wave doesn’t retail the same on Amazon as it does chair-side in a salon, so the same supplier can pencil out in one channel and lose money in another. Budget (anywhere from $100 to $50,000) determines how many units you can actually stock, which drives the break-even math. And the MOQ question is there because the cheapest wholesale price is irrelevant if the supplier’s minimum order is triple your budget; telling us your tolerance up front keeps those matches out of your plan.
Most launch calculators flatter you. This one gates on feasibility: if your budget buys fewer than five units at the cheapest profitable supplier, or no supplier in the niche can be resold at typical retail, you get an alternatives view instead of a plan — because a one-bundle “starter run” is not a business. Suppliers with no public pricing and marketplace aggregators are filtered out before scoring for the same reason: a plan you can’t act on is noise.
Treat the output as your model, not your gospel. Request a real quote from the matched supplier and the runner-up, then re-check the margin with the pricing tool once shipping is included. Budget for the costs the plan can’t see — the SBA’s startup-cost worksheet is a solid checklist for the rest. And before you wire anyone money, read how we work so you know exactly what our supplier documentation does and doesn’t verify. The rest of Inches for Business picks up from there.
You get an honest 'not profitable' view with alternatives instead of a fake plan. If no supplier in your niche can be resold at typical retail, or your budget buys fewer than 5 units at the cheapest profitable supplier, the optimizer says so and suggests niches or budgets that do work.
From public business listings — hair salons, wig shops, and extension stores across the US, filtered to your state. Each plan surfaces a handful to contact first, with a link to the full state list.
Three filters keep the plan real: suppliers with no public price are excluded (no way to compute your economics), suppliers whose wholesale price exceeds typical retail are excluded (you'd lose money on every unit), and marketplace aggregators are excluded because they'd send you to a homepage rather than a vendor.
No. It's a starting model built from public price data and typical retail ranges. Your actual costs — shipping, returns, marketing, platform fees — will move the numbers. Validate the plan against your own quotes before committing money.
Ready to run yours? Get started with Inches Pro →
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