Online Shopping: A Conundrum (I)
Part One: A Brush with Reality
At The Beginning
Context
Recently, I found myself in need of a new hairbrush. A creature of habit, I like going back to the same stores for the same model of product that needs replacing. This regime applies to toiletries, garment basics, and socks.
This makes sense — not all brands are comfortable for you and if you find a suitable one, one usually sticks to it to save the time and money that would otherwise be reinvested to evaluating a myriad of unknown products.
This strategy works for daily items that you might have to replace once every couple of months. Occasionally you get caught by a change in packaging, but overall, you have a pretty good handle of whether your next month’s supply is in stock.
The Problem
The problem is, for bigger ticket items, or items that last longer, often times the company no longer stocks whatever you are seeking to replace. Items like, in my case — you guessed it — a hairbrush. My hairbrush has lasted me some, say 10-odd years. To be honest, I’ve lost count. What are the odds of them still having the same model?
The hairbrush seemed fancy, like something you might purloin, nay, purchase from a big-name hair saloon — but I have absolutely no recollection of purchasing one.
Likely, it could have been something my mother had gotten for me on one of her own packaged hair saloon trips.
The Journey
First Stop: Convenience Store/Pharmacy
Our story to replace this mysterious, wonderful, and unattainably out-of-order Vidal Sassoon hairbrush begins way back at the tail-end of 2019. Being an unconscientious and generally reluctant online shopper, I tried to obtain a brush from one of our local pharmacies (Guardian). They didn’t stock Vidal Sassoon but because I was desperate, I got one “cheaply” for something like 12 dollars to try.
In fact, because I suspected the first brush’s bristles would be too thin for my liking, I bought another brush from the same line that had stronger metallic bristles as a companion. One of the brushes would serve to detangle, and the other to massage my scalp. A hack, but it still didn’t cost more than 30 dollars altogether. Perhaps I could cobble together the goodness of my original brush with these two replacements. Or so I thought.
On hindsight, that the brand had so many different types of brushes might have been an alarm bell.
Whatever it was — in-house brand, or drugstore/convenience-store brand (be-you-tiful); this solution turned out to last me less than a month. The bristle ends of both brushes had already started to wear out, the steel bristles were too steely for comfort, and the gap between the rubber sole that held the bristles and the plastic handle of the brushes often had my hair caught in between.
There was 30 dollars down the drain.
Second Stop: Online for Aveda
Trying to avoid having to visit the hair saloon, the land of exorbitant prices and even more exuberant sales people; I resolved to go online this time.
And because I was going online, I thought, “Well then, might as well go for something different. Maybe I should re-optimise. For cost, and design.”
I was going to look for another brand.
On hindsight, this might have been a poor idea. I was going against my tried and tested principles of brand confidence. Vidal Sassoon had served me for years. Why didn’t I just stick with them? Consumer itch?
One of the first hits you will see when Google-ing for brushes at that time was the Aveda-brand Paddle Brush. The other thing you’ll notice is, at its highest retail price in 2020, it cost a breath-taking 50–80 SGD. There was a Vidal Sassoon Paddle Brush retailing for something like 40 SGD.
Perhaps the Aveda Paddle Brush was what was up these days, I reasoned. Copycats abound on Shopee, Lazada and other sites. Aveda sounded like a spa and lifestyle brand — perhaps the wooden handle was more eco-friendly than the black plastic VS one.
What if they had invented some amazing new spa technology and incorporated it into their brush? I convinced myself to try the Aveda brush.
Now the question was, which Aveda brush? There was the one retailing at 34.50 SGD on Qoo10, another one at 11 SGD on Shopee, and yet another one at 8 SGD. I didn’t want to spend more than 30 SGD for a hairbrush, so I wasn’t going to pay for any of the 50–80 SGD ones. To make matters worst, the Aveda site only shipped to locations in the US.
So how was I going to know which Aveda brush was the real deal, if any?
I decided to go for the 34.50 SGD from Qoo10, hoping to dispel my previous cheapo mojo and get one that could go the distance. There were no red-flag reviews, and the seller was also based in Singapore, so perhaps more trustworthy?
Order placed, and received in three days.
Unfortunately, I still ended up somewhat disappointed. The brush seemed fairly heavy, but the bristles were not strong enough to give me a decent scalp massage. And as with every online item that is not bought directly from brand but from a consumer marketplace; I had the niggling, nagging feeling that this product could be a rip-off.
There were no external signs — there was the same packaging — but I know my Chinese manufacturers too well to see that the flimsy cardboard packaging posed no challenge to any counterfeiter.
After several months of use, I wasn’t impressed. If this was the real Aveda brush, I would just have to say it wasn’t for me. And it certainly wasn’t worth 80 SGD to me. It was barely worth 30 SGD. The bristles had not kept their perkiness, and the base of the brush was collapsing on itself. Not to mention the plastic bristle material was starting to look questionably mucky after several washes.
Checking online now, almost a year later— I see that the brush retails at 29.95 USD on the Aveda official website, and there are no longer any signs of the ridiculous 50–80 SGD prices. Aveda re-sellers don’t breach the 30 SGD mark. The more ‘automatic’ ones, to use a Singaporean slang, hover at the 10 SGD price range. Looks like the market had corrected itself!
Had I been taken for a ride by the Qoo10 seller (Tivox)? Perhaps the Aveda brand just doesn’t suit me. They appear to still be retailing these Aveda brushes at similar price ranges at the time of writing.
Third Stop: Online for Everything and Your Mama’s Watch
This was now the third time I was back shopping for a hairbrush in the span of 12–13 months. I was seething.
What started as a not-so-routine effort to replace a beloved personal item was now a full blown mission to find the world’s best paddle brush. No longer was I going to be at the mercy of the countless resellers on online consumer platforms. I was going to find out who was selling what — once and for all.
At the same time, I had some curiosity. I had been toying with the idea of using wood as a more organic way of brushing one’s hair. What if I could get some brushes with wooden bristles?
I recalled once buying a pocket-sized wooden comb from a shop in Chinatown for 1 SGD. Perhaps they sold similar things, but in brush-form, online?
Sure enough, there were a dozen sellers on Shopee doing just that. Some had just the one product, and others sold several shapes and sizes.
I got one of each. And a couple of 10 SGD “Aveda” brushes to boot.
Within the next few days deliverymen rained down on the house with bundled packages of sticky combs, doubtless wondering just how many heads were living in this household.
There was a package with brushes direct from Chinese sellers, perhaps straight from the assembly-line. And packages from Singapore-based resellers. The first package to arrive was from a Singapore Ubi warehouse. But so was the last package.
Consolidating my buys, the result is that some of the so-called “Aveda” brushes were not too shabby at all. They were lighter than my first “Aveda” brush purchase, but fared similarly in terms of usability and bristle power. Best of all, you didn’t have to worry about them being imitation products because you paid imitation product price for them.
For the wooden-bristled paddle brushes, they worked surprisingly well. And I’m using one of the better quality ones as my goto brush for detangling and scalp massage. I’ve yet to try the bamboo-bristled ones.
I think I also better understand my needs in a hairbrush. I don’t need heavy brush handles, but I do need very particular bristles: non-plastic, medium-sized and sufficiently dense.
Ultimately, the brush that worked cost less than 5 SGD. No kidding. Critically, the item came in good condition.
Just how bad are products online?
While in general, most of the items came in acceptable condition — some of the ones packaged direct from China had a strange scent (chemicals from the factory?) and a pair of items from the Singapore warehouse did not look like they had been kept in good condition, with some staining on the brush handles and packaging.
Because the ones shipping direct from China usually also cost less, I think the experience is acceptable for items where the savings are significant — it just means you have to do a bit more cleaning and touching up on your end after receiving the raw product. They pass through the regional distribution centres and could pick up a few more particles here and there before reaching you.
For the items that come from Singaporean resellers, it’s a shame if the reseller does not have a good plan on storage. In order to value-add, some quality control, for example washing the brushes or sifting out the ones that are damaged would have been ideal. The brush I eventually picked seem to have undergone a bit more cosmetic-surgery than its counterparts — nicer sole, well-finished handle, and even a ‘Gold Fever’ imprint, making it immediately more appealing.
That’s a manufacturer, although not based in Singapore, that is doing some homework to differentiate themselves from their slew of competitors. The shop was siyuyuan.sg.
I might have finally found my replacement brush for less than 5 SGD, and online. (It was from China with an additional delivery cost of 1 SGD.)
The question is, would I have been able to pick it out from the rash of options available? At first pass?
It’s hard to make comparisons online
My beef with online shopping is that it is incredibly hard to make real product comparisons. If these resellers had physical shops in a physical marketplace, a shopper would have been able to suss them out and compare, brush for brush the apparent quality, whether by feel, touch and/or other senses. Just merely the brush size, bristle quality, sole material, handle shape, would have thrown up a number of no-gos.
You might argue that most online retailers have product specifications, but how many of us are able to visualise the size of things from a series of numbers? I know I can’t. You could sell me a mini-brush as a regular-sized one and I wouldn’t know any better until it reaches my front doorstep.
How many of us would complain to have our money back on an item that didn’t exactly meet the specifications, or even the pictures in the product page? If the item costs less than 5 SGD? Perhaps one recourse for a disappointed and/or angry customer might be the feedback section.
I can barely differentiate between different sellers, who sometimes use the same product picture as a competitor for their online inventory. If I had to go through the process sequentially, trying each seller one by one, waiting for the individual orders to be delivered (and incurring the respective delivery charges) before purchasing again if unsatisfied — that would have required a level of organisation, time and patience that would render the exercise near impossible for my habits.
It’s a scam, basically. For items that are so inexpensive, you are psyched into bulk buying in order to reduce delivery cost.
Conclusion
I can now say I’m more familiar with the hairbrush online market space. The bad news is, if any of these brushes are any good — my knowledge would be obsolete the next time I need to use it. Ah well, knowledge is knowledge — perhaps we’ll be able to adapt it for the conditions in a couple of years.
Manufacturing to Retail
One interesting thing is that for all their apparent similarity, the products from each seller differed in aspects that suggest they come from different manufacturers. For example, in terms of overall weight, slight differentiations in brush handle shapes and even in the material used for the bristle sole. Some varied from a rubber material similar to that used in bowling alleys to finer PVC materials.
So it wasn’t the case of a farrago of sellers for fewer factories, but just multiple production lines with individual online sellers. I can’t say if this is the case for all online products, but this was somewhat surprising, and informative to me.
It almost suggests that it’s easier to spin up factories in China than it is to set up an online retail presence in Singapore. Probably not, but almost.
I’ve also had the peculiar experience of buying from the same Taobao retailer the same listing twice only to have the actual product received the second time round differ from the one I received a few months earlier. Did the manufacturer switch materials, or did the seller switch manufacturers?
On Knock-Offs and Copy-Cats
And why was it that the Aveda brush had so many knock-offs, whilst others like Dyson and Vidal Sassoon had less? Was it just easier to copy and mass produce? Was there an issue with employee mangement in the Aveda manufacturing plants? Or perhaps a lack of IP protection? That still puzzles me.
Aveda might argue they are the most popular (and indeed their iconic wooden handle seems the most featured on Unsplash photography) and thus the most susceptible to knock-offs, in a manner similar to the deluge of Longchamp and Louis Vuitton bags we often see in the pasar malam. But it begs the question, is there any protection from these copycats?
And from a consumer’s perspective — should there be? From my personal experience the ones that cost 10 SGD were no worse than the ones costing 34.50 SGD, with the features that mattered intact and perhaps even better execution (that is, if the 34.50 SGD was even the real thing in the first place).
Copycats in hairbrushes may not ostensibly affect the business of the original company, because the consumers of the copycats would not have purchased from them in the first place. It can be argued that the presence of counterfeits may serve as subliminal advertising, similar to how I was convinced to try an Aveda brush when I saw it was the most frequently searched brush on my Google search one year ago. This could help with brand presence overall. So even Aveda might not be incentivised to clamp down on either counterfeiters or resellers of counterfeits.
But from a consumer’s perspective, you don’t want to pay real-deal money for a counterfeit product. If however, they offer an alternative at a lower price — then, it’s a boon for everybody.
If a product’s value was contingent on its scarcity, the consumer landscape might be very different.
tldr
If there’s one thing I learnt about online shopping for hairbrushes; it’s that if you can’t buy a brand item direct, and there are low-ass prices in the market — go for the low-ass versions. Especially if there’s already been a lot of buyers and no complaints. Because there’s no stopping someone from selling you a knock-off priced at the real deal’s price point.
It’s hard to make comparisons online, so amid a hodgepodge of brand-less options, go cheaper is the best advice.
Of course, know what you are looking for. My needs happened to be satisfied by nameless manufacturers — but if you are looking for that Dyson or Vidal Sassoon hairbrush, there’s one on Lazada going for 25 SGD, which by Dyson rates, looks like a steal. The VS one is going for 36.50 SGD at the time of this auspicious 6.6 writing.
There’s a saying in shopping. Certain items you can scrimp on, for others you have to splurge. Sometimes you have expensive taste in one thing, and other times, you score big and are completely satisfied with something that doesn’t cost all that much. Hairbrushes, they are personal items you use daily and interact with an important part of your body — it’s not unreasonable to spend more than a few dollars if the more expensive make has a value-add for you.
In the second part of this series, I’ll explore why and how I stick to certain brands in the sports shoe domain.
Finally, anyone in need of a hairbrush?
