Two suppliers quote you for the same twenty-inch straight hair. One is roughly three times the other. Neither is lying about the hair. The difference is almost always how it was attached to the base — and once you can see that difference, most confusing quotes stop being confusing.
What a weft is
A weft is a curtain of hair sewn along a seam by machine. The seam is then sewn onto a cap in rows, like shingles on a roof. It is fast, consistent, and it is how the overwhelming majority of hair extensions and most commercial wigs are made.
A machine can sew several metres of weft in the time it takes a person to tie a few hundred knots. That ratio is the whole story of the price gap.
What hand-tying is
Hand-tying — ventilating — means drawing individual hairs through the mesh of a base with a small hook and knotting each one in place. One at a time. A full lace wig runs to roughly thirty thousand knots and takes one artisan seven to ten working days.
The reason to do it that way is not craftsmanship for its own sake. On a real scalp, hair leaves the skin at an angle, and that angle rotates as it travels across the crown, around the whorl and down to the nape. A hand tying knots can follow that rotation. A sewing machine attaching a straight seam cannot — it can only lay hair in rows.
That is also why a hand-tied parting reads as skin and a wefted one reads as a product. The hair is not leaving the base in one direction.
What the price actually buys
| Movement | Hand-tied hair swings from the knot and falls back naturally. Wefted hair moves as a sheet from the row it is sewn to |
| Parting | Hand-tied can be parted anywhere. A wefted cap has a parting where the maker put one, and nowhere else |
| Weight | Rows of weft stack up. The same length hand-tied is noticeably lighter on the head |
| Close inspection | Wefted rows are visible if the wind lifts the hair. Knots are not |
| Repair | A hand-tied piece can be refilled where it thins. A worn weft is replaced as a unit |
When wefted is the right answer
We make both, and we will tell a customer to buy the cheaper one when it fits. Wefted is the better choice more often than a workshop like ours has any commercial reason to admit.
- Volume, not concealment. A client adding thickness or length, who is not hiding hair loss, does not need thirty thousand knots.
- Occasional wear. A piece worn for events a few times a year will outlive its owner’s interest before construction matters.
- Colour experiments. If a client changes shade every season, buying hand-tied is buying durability they will throw away.
- Price-led markets. If your customers compare on price alone, a hand-tied piece will sit on your shelf while the wefted one sells.
Where hand-tying earns its cost is medical hair loss, daily wear, and any situation where the client is going to be looked at closely by people who know them. That is the work this workshop was built around.
How to tell them apart in your hand
Turn the piece inside out and look at the base rather than the hair. Wefts appear as parallel seams stitched in rows — you can trace them with a fingertip. A hand-tied base has no rows at all, only mesh with tiny knots distributed across it.
Then hold it up to a window. Light through a hand-tied base shows individual points. Light through a wefted cap shows lines.
Anyone can photograph the outside of a finished piece; almost nobody photographs the inside. That asymmetry is useful to you as a buyer — the factory page sets out four more questions worth asking any supplier before an order.
The method used on each of our products is stated on its page — see how we build a wig for the process, or wholesale for lead times, which differ sharply between the two: seven to ten days for wefted work, eighteen to twenty-five for full lace tied throughout.