Korean businesses’ dominance in the Black hair-care industry

Korean businesses’ dominance in the Black hair-care industry is presented as the outcome of connected histories: the cultural importance of Black hair, the growth of South Korea’s wig trade, and immigrant networks that helped Korean newcomers establish businesses in New York City. The market provides opportunity for families such as Daniel Jae Ho Bae’s, but its ownership and distribution patterns also make visible a broader inequality: an industry serving African American customers is difficult for other groups to enter, while hair itself carries meanings that reach beyond commerce.

Historical Foundations and Hair’s Significance

The account reaches back to fifteenth-century African civilizations, where hairstyles could communicate tribe or family background, religion, and social standing. Elaborate styles could signify wealth and power; subdued styles could mark mourning. Hair also held spiritual significance for many Africans, who understood it as close to the skies and as a possible passageway for spirits to the soul or a means of interacting with God. These examples establish that hair was not merely a matter of appearance before the later commercial industry took shape.

After slavery, African American hair acquired additional meanings under beauty standards that favored European features. Straight, smooth hair was treated as good, while tightly curled natural hair was devalued. The ensuing choices about styling therefore took place within a history that had already attached social judgments to texture. In the early twentieth century, Madam C. J. Walker became a millionaire by developing and marketing hair-care products to Black women, most famously improving the hot comb used to straighten hair. In the 1960s, George E. Johnson marketed the relaxer, a chemical product for straightening naturally curly hair. By the modern period, estimates placed the Black hair-care industry’s annual value above one billion dollars.

The meaning of styling remained contested. Wearing hair natural or straightened could be interpreted in relation to beauty, self-image, self-hatred, or political identification with Black power. The account does not reduce any one choice to a single motive: it emphasizes that hair practices have often involved more than personal vanity or an individual judgment of beauty. This cultural history matters to the business story because the stores and products operate in a field shaped by both consumer demand and long-running disputes over whose standards define desirable hair.

How the Market Became Concentrated

The account traces Korean prominence in the industry to the 1960s, when wigs made with South Korean hair grew popular in the African American community. The South Korean government then prohibited exports of raw hair, so wigs featuring South Korean hair could be made only in South Korea. At the same time, the United States prohibited imports of wigs containing hair from China. Together, these policies helped secure South Korea’s position in the wig market. The wig trade subsequently developed into the broader Black hair-care business.

This history is followed by a description of market control across several stages of the trade. Estimates suggest South Korean businesses control between 60 and 80 percent of the market, including distribution and retail and, increasingly, manufacturing. The account identifies distribution as a particular barrier: South Korean distributors primarily supply South Korean retailers, leaving other groups with little access to the channels needed to establish themselves. The imbalance is therefore not described only as a matter of which businesses own storefronts. It also concerns who can obtain products and participate in the supply network that connects manufacturing, distribution, and retail.

Immigrant Networks and Daniel Jae Ho Bae’s Family

Daniel Jae Ho Bae’s family entered the business through a community already established in New York City. When Dae Hyun Bae and Min Soo Bae moved there, fellow South Korean immigrants were available to help them. A cousin lent them money and advised them to open a Black hair-care store; the cousin already owned a similar store, as did many others in the community, and those businesses were thriving. Their entry into the industry thus depended not only on individual initiative but also on credit, advice, and a network of people who knew the trade.

The family’s path illustrates how the industry’s concentrated structure can also create a route to economic advancement for newcomers connected to that network. Dae Hyun Bae, however, does not know the history behind South Korean dominance or the policies that helped produce it. What he understands is America as a land of opportunity and the possibility that his children will have more than he once did. The contrast is consequential: the market has an explainable political and economic history, while his experience of it is framed through family aspiration and the prospect of a better future.

Inequality, Recognition, and the Narrative’s Wider Stakes

The narrator recognizes the injustice commonly associated with Korean ownership of Black hair-care businesses and realizes that this context had not come to mind when Daniel Jae Ho Bae mentioned that his family owned a store. That delayed recognition brings the structural history into an intimate encounter: a family business can be both an ordinary source of work and security for its owners and part of an industry whose distribution patterns restrict access for others. The account holds these realities together rather than treating the family’s opportunity as proof that the broader arrangement is fair, or its structural critique as a complete account of any individual family’s motives.

A separate moment of frustrated questioning considers whether two people could have continued together under the weight of others’ stares. It gives the discussion of unequal structures an interpersonal echo: social scrutiny can bear on private relationships as well as on markets and ownership. The evidence does not equate those experiences, but places questions of racial perception and the difficulty of being watched alongside the account of an industry shaped by racial history. In that wider frame, Black hair-care businesses are more than storefronts: they sit at the intersection of cultural expression, contested beauty standards, immigrant enterprise, and unequal control of commercial access.