From ‘Team Bahay’ to 15 years strong: How a student grew her hair extensions business

MANILA, Philippines — Growing up, Denise Aquino, owner of beauty brand Tokyo Posh Hair Extensions, never thought she would enter a beauty business – first of all, she did not see herself as beautiful.

“I didn't grow up like in a way that I was regarded as pretty,” Aquino professed to Philstar.com at the recent opening of her brand’s first hair extensions bar in Look At Me, SM Aura Premier, Taguig City.

“When I was in high school, I was very simple, no manliligaws, no one.”

But something began to ignite in Denise when she was a Fashion Design student in Tokyo, Japan in 2007. At 23 years old, she thought of trying her luck in her uncharted territory, beauty.

“When I was a student in Tokyo… there kasi, hair extensions were used in a different way. They were used as fashion accessories. Something that you change on a daily basis. It’s like bag or makeup, you know, like today you wear red, tomorrow it’s pink, the next day it's orange. So that's how they use hair."

"They use hair to express themselves. So like for example, today you want to look chic, so you put your hair up in a bun. Tomorrow, you want to look like very girly, you want to put your hair long, wavy and curly…So that's how they treat hair. It's an accessory that they change on a daily basis depending on what they feel or the look that they want to portray that day. So that’s the kind of thinking that I want to bring sana to the Philippines.”

With a vision to introduce to the Philippines the Japanese beauty culture of wearing hair extensions every day like any accessory, Denise came back to the Philippines and began selling hair extensions from home.

“We started first selling from the house because I didn't know how the reception would be,” she recalled.

“Actually, it was shocking,” she said of the reception to the hair extensions she designs and commissions for manufacturing in Japan. 

This prompted her to open her first store in 2009 in SM Pasig near Tiendesitas, then a second branch in Rockwell, Makati in 2010.

“In SM Pasig at that time, I just opened it just to test out the market. It was good. It was so good that we got offered by Rockwell. I saw it as a big, big, big opportunity for us... That's