Prepared hair, wigs and extensions sit in HS heading 6704, a heading with dedicated sub-lines for synthetic material, for human hair, and for articles partly of human hair. Customs officers work in this heading constantly, which is why vague commercial invoices attract scrutiny. A shipment described accurately clears quickly; a shipment described as generic hair product does not.
1. The Description Has to Match the Product
The single most common cause of a held shipment is a description that does not discriminate. Human hair and synthetic fibre are classified differently and carry different duty treatment, and a mixed bundle must be declared as what it is. If a bundle blends human and synthetic fibre, describe it that way on the invoice and on the packing list rather than declaring the dominant material alone.
Gauge specification, length and colour should appear in the description too, because they are the fields an officer uses to sanity-check the declared value per unit.
2. Unit Count and Declared Value
Extensions are frequently declared by weight when the commercial reality is strand count. That mismatch is what turns a straightforward clearance into a valuation question. Pick one consistent basis, apply it to every shipment, and make sure the packing list, the invoice and the physical carton labels agree with each other.
3. What to Prepare Before the Goods Leave
- Commercial invoice: per-line description with material, gauge, length, colour and unit basis. No line described only as 'hair product'.
- Packing list: carton-by-carton breakdown that reconciles to the invoice totals, including any mixed-material bundles declared separately.
- Supporting documents: keep material declarations, and for prepared and hand-made lines keep the production note describing the process performed.
- Photographs of the shipment as packed: cheap to produce, and the fastest answer when a border query arrives mid-transit.
4. Reading Landed Cost Back Into Your Pricing
Build the landed figure as unit cost plus freight plus duty plus clearance, and then add the cost of the cash tied up across the shipment window. Delays are not merely administrative: three extra days on the water plus two at the border changes when you can reorder, and that is the number your pricing model has to absorb.
The Import-Ready Loc Manifest
A declared-value anchor line, a batch-consistency sample and a high-value reference product, chosen so the packing list can be verified line by line at the border.
