Taaz Hair App will help you see how you'll look with a new hairdo, even before you have it

Most women are a marketers delight. They are often willing to part with their money for novelties. This is turning out to be a true on the app space as well. Taaz.com's mobile app is one of the highest grossing mobile app on the Android and iOS platform. It is an app that lets women try out different kinds of hairstyles on themselves or sample mock images.

This US based startup has got great adulation across international media prior to this. The service is free to use on the web version, but the apps were launched at a price - $2.99 on the App Store and 50 Rs on the Google Play Store. And by the looks of it, the bet seems to have paid off for Taaz. But why is this so?

What is it about?

The hair app by Taaz, allows you to pick photos from the phone's gallery, or from one of the stock images on the app itself. Subsequently, you can take a photo of yourself using the camera from the app itself. Post this, you can choose from a range of hair styles - short, long, medium etc etc. The fact that the hair styles are displayed on the heads of celebrities adds that bit of aspirational value.

Once you've chosen a category of hair style, you can swipe to the sides to try different hairstyles. Swiping vertically changes the hair colour. You can share your new look and hairstyle across various social media platforms.

The hairstyle templates need to downloaded for a first time app user. Apart from this, the app itself is quite large from a file size standpoint (18 MB on Android and 33 MB on iOS).

So who is buying it? 

Taaz definitely doesn't have a large Indian customer base. The iOS version launched late last year and it is doing quite well. The Android app doesn't have so much traction, as it only recently launched. I did a little asking around to see if women I know would buy it. Not one agree. While the fact that Indians don't buy apps in general could be a major contributing factor to this, there is another interesting reason as to why Indian customers won't buy this app -

Most established beauty parlors in India already have similar apps specific to their offerings. Businesses include the cost of building these apps in their services, which a model which Indians aren't averse to paying. So from a value point of view, the Taaz hair app isn't something that an Indian audience will pay for.

I think the majority of the Taaz hair app's customers are in other, more paid app friendly geographies. However, the app is a lot of fun to try out and even useful, if you put in the effort to take a good photo of yourself, at the right distance.

Buy the Android version here.

Buy the iOS version here.