Whether you're preparing for a special occasion or just want to change up your everyday style, this ultimate guide to buying hair extensions will equip you with all the knowledge you need to make an informed choice.
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Before we dive into the world of hair extensions, let's explore why they're a fantastic choice:
Instant Transformation: Hair extensions provide instant length, volume, and texture, allowing you to achieve your desired look without waiting for your natural hair to grow.
Endless Style Options: With hair extensions, you can experiment with different hairstyles, colors, and textures without committing to permanent changes.
Boosted Confidence: A fuller, more voluminous mane can boost your confidence and make you feel like the best version of yourself no matter where you are.
Hair Health: High-quality extensions can protect your natural hair from damage caused by excessive styling, heat, and chemical treatments.
Now that you're excited about the possibilities, let's delve into the world of hair extensions.
Hair extensions come in various types, and choosing the right one is essential for achieving the look you desire. Here are the most common types:
Clip-In Extensions: These are perfect for beginners. They're easy to apply and remove and are ideal for occasional use.
Tape-In Extensions: These extensions are semi-permanent and offer a natural look. They are lightweight and comfortable to wear.
Weft Extensions: Sewn onto a track of beads, these extensions are long-lasting and provide a secure fit. They're suitable for those looking for extended wear.
Fusion (Pre-Bonded or Kera-Link) Extensions: These extensions are bonded to your natural hair with adhesive. They offer a seamless look with natural hair movement. They require professional installation and removal.
Micro-Link (Micro-Bead, I-Link or Flat-Tip) Extensions: These extensions are attached using tiny metal beads. They are gentle on your natural hair and provide a secure fit.
When choosing the right type of extensions, consider your lifestyle, budget, and how often you want to wear them.
Quality should be a top priority when buying hair extensions. High-quality extensions not only look more natural but also last longer and require less maintenance. Here's what to look for:
Remy Human Hair: Opt for extensions made from 100% Remy human hair. This type of hair maintains its natural cuticle and direction, reducing tangling and matting. (Note: Donna Bella Hair uses virgin 100% Remy human hair, which is the best quality you can find on the market. Curious to learn more about what makes Remy different? Read our blog post on Remy hair.)
Texture Matching: Ensure the extensions match the texture of your natural hair for a seamless blend. Keep in mind that curly and wavy extensions should never be straightened.
Color Matching: Choose extensions that closely match your hair color or consider getting them professionally dyed for a perfect match.
Length and Weight: Determine the desired length and weight of the extensions based on your style goals and comfort preferences.
Taking care of your extensions is crucial to ensure they remain in excellent condition. Besides the hair itself, here are some essential aftercare supplies:
Extension Brush: Invest in a special brush designed for extensions to prevent damage while detangling. The bristles on an Extension Brush are specially made to detangle a lot of hair and to move smoothly through it without catching.
Heat Protectant: If you plan to use heat styling tools, a quality heat protectant is a must to shield both your natural hair and the extensions.
Sulfate-Free Shampoo and Conditioner: Use sulfate-free products to keep your extensions soft and prevent damage. Products with sulfates can dry out your extensions.
Leave-In Conditioner: A leave-in conditioner helps maintain the extensions' softness and shine.
Silk Pillowcase: Sleeping on a silk pillowcase reduces friction, minimizing tangling and matting.
Storage: When not in use, store your extensions in an airtight container or bag to prevent dust and damage.
Before buying hair extensions, it's essential to gather information to ensure that you make an informed decision and choose the right product for your needs. Here are some common questions to ask before purchasing hair extensions, along with the reasons for asking them:
What Type of Hair is Used in the Extensions?
Reason: Different types of hair, such as human hair or synthetic hair, have distinct characteristics. Virgin Remy human hair is the best quality on the market and it provides a more natural look, feel, and styling versatility compared to synthetic alternatives. Remy hair is considered high quality because the cuticles are intact and aligned in the same direction. This helps prevent tangling and ensures a smoother, more natural appearance.
What Length and Thickness are Available?
Reason: Knowing the available lengths and thickness options allows you to choose extensions that seamlessly blend with your natural hair and achieve your desired look.
How Many Packs or Bundles Do I Need?
Reason: The quantity of hair needed depends on factors such as the desired volume, length, and your natural hair type. This question ensures that you purchase enough extensions for a full and natural-looking result.
What Installation Methods are Compatible?
Reason: Different hair extension types require specific installation methods. Understanding compatibility helps you choose the method that aligns with your preferences and lifestyle. This includes things like how often you wear your hair up, how often you like to come to the salon to get the hair moved up, and what hair type and thickness you have.
Can I See Customer Reviews or Before-and-After Pictures?
Reason: Reviews and visual examples provide insights into the experiences of other customers and the actual results achieved with the extensions. They help you gauge the product's quality and performance.
Proper maintenance is key to extending the lifespan of your hair extensions:
Regular Brushing: Gently brush your extensions daily to prevent tangles.
Washing: Wash your extensions as needed, no more than 2-3 times per week.
Heat Styling: Use heat styling tools on a low to medium heat setting and apply a heat protectant before styling.
Professional Help: Seek professional assistance for installation, removal, and any necessary adjustments.
Avoid Chemicals: Refrain from using hair products containing alcohol, as they can dry out and damage the extensions.
Maintenance Appointments: Schedule regular maintenance appointments with a stylist to ensure your extensions stay in top condition.
With this ultimate guide to buying hair extensions, you're well-equipped to embark on your hair transformation journey. Remember that choosing the right type of extensions, prioritizing quality, and investing in aftercare supplies are essential steps in achieving the look of your dreams. Whether you're adding length, volume, or a pop of color, hair extensions are your ticket to hair perfection.
If you're in the market for demo automation software, you've likely come across Storylane and Walnut.io. This comparison aims to help you differentiate between both platforms to guide your purchase decision.
At a high level, Storylane and Walnut share several similarities. They’re both demo automation softwares that support HTML/CSS demos, browser extension-based capture, demo engagement analytics and insights, and CRM integrations. That being said, Storylane stands out significantly when it comes to product versatility, user satisfaction, pricing flexibility, and overall platform capabilities. Here's how:
TL;DR: a few broad reasons why + customers choose Storylane over Walnut.io
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to capture interactive demos:
Walnut focuses exclusively on HTML/CSS-based demos, which can be limiting when teams need video walkthroughs or screenshot-based demos. Storylane, on the other hand, is expressly designed for both demo formats — complete with auto-capture, annotations, guides, blurs, zooms, presenter videos, voiceovers, and more.
This flexibility puts Storylane in a significantly stronger position when it comes to scaling demos across departments and use-cases. Marketing teams can create image-based guided demos for websites, sales teams can use HTML/CSS demos for personalized experiences, and customer success can leverage video demos for onboarding.
Walnut.io is built primarily for sales teams, which can create friction when marketing, presales, or customer success teams need to create and manage demos. The platform's focus on sales workflows makes it less accessible for other departments.
Storylane is specifically designed for horizontal adoption across the entire go-to-market organization:
This cross-functional design is evident in features like Demo Hub, which allows teams to create galleries and playlists of demos that address multiple buyer personas and use cases in one place. Walnut does not offer comparable functionality.
User satisfaction data reveals a significant gap between the platforms. Walnut currently ranks 17th on G2's demo automation category with a satisfaction score of 32/100, while Storylane maintains substantially higher ratings with a satisfaction score of 99/100.
(Update: As of July , Walnut is no longer in the top 20 demo automation software)
Storylane's intuitive interface and self-serve capabilities contribute to its higher user satisfaction. The platform's design focuses on practical usability rather than just aesthetic appeal, making it easier for teams to create, manage, and share demos without extensive training.
With a starting price of $9,200/year and no free tier, Walnut requires a substantial commitment upfront. This high entry point can be prohibitive for smaller teams or organizations wanting to test demo automation before making a significant investment.
Storylane’s pricing plans offer a more accessible approach with:
One of Storylane's biggest differentiators against Walnut is AI functionality:
Storylane’s demo creation capabilities include:
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As it stands, Walnut does not currently offer comparable AI features, putting them behind the innovation curve in the rapidly evolving demo automation space.
Storylane's Buyer Hub is a flagship feature that allows teams to showcase libraries of bite-sized product demos, PDFs, videos, and more through galleries and playlists. This organization makes it easier to:
Though Walnut supports a playlist style demo experience, its organization capabilities are relatively limited, making it challenging to manage multiple demos for different audiences and use cases.
Your decision ultimately depends on your priorities:
Choose Walnut if:
Choose Storylane if:
Storylane supports multiple demo formats (HTML, video, screenshot) and is designed for cross-functional teams, while Walnut focuses exclusively on HTML demos for sales teams. Storylane also offers AI features, a free tier, and higher user satisfaction ratings.
Yes, Storylane supports both HTML/CSS interactive demos and video/screenshot-based demos. This flexibility allows teams to choose the best format for their specific use case.
While Walnut is built specifically for sales teams, Storylane actually offers superior capabilities with AI-powered creation, better personalization, and higher user satisfaction. Storylane's cross-functional design also enables better collaboration across teams.
Yes, Storylane offers a self-serve free plan that allows teams to build demos without financial commitment. Walnut starts at $9,200/year with no free tier.
Lily AI is Storylane's intelligent sales assistant that guides prospects through conversational product discovery based on your demos, sales calls, and knowledge base. It's part of Storylane's AI-native platform that includes demo creation, avatars, and voiceovers.
While both platforms will help you create interactive demos, Storylane offers a more versatile, user-friendly solution that scales across departments. Walnut's sales-specific approach works for certain teams, but its HTML-only focus, higher price point, and lower user satisfaction scores make it a more limited option for organizations looking to scale their demo strategy.
We encourage you to try both platforms and see the difference for yourself. Storylane's free plan makes it easy to get started without a significant commitment. If you choose to work with us, we hope the question "what's next?" excites you as much as it excites us!
Top Walnut.io Alternatives for Your Demo Needs
If you're in the market for demo automation software, you've probably come across Storylane and Navattic. This comparison should help you differentiate between both platforms to guide your purchase decision.
At a high-level, customers prefer Storylane for the product functionality, versatility, ease-of-use, commercial model, and rate of innovation.
Before diving in, here’s a quick overview of core features common to both Storylane and Navattic — really, they’re table stakes for any modern demo automation platform:
And with that out of the way, here are a few ways Storylane stands out from Navattic...
Broadly, there are two formats of interactive demos:
In their own words, Navattic only specializes in top-of-funnel HTML demos. Storylane, on the other hand, is expressly designed for both demo formats — complete with auto-capture, annotations, guides, blurs, zooms, presenter videos, voice overs, and more.
What does this mean for you? With Storylane, you have the flexibility to pick between demo formats based on your needs: image-based guided demos for your website, video demos for campaigns, HTML demos for sandbox environments, etc.
This flexibility (coupled with the next set of differences) puts Storylane in an unequivocally stronger position when it comes to scaling demos across departments and use-cases.
One of Storylane’s biggest differentiators against Navattic (and pretty much every other vendor in this category) is Lily, our demo automation agent. Broadly, Lily helps in two ways:
Here’s a rundown of what you can do with Lily today:
As for discovery, think of Lily as a conversation product expert with as much information as your best sales person, available 24/7 to guide prospects through discovery and qualification. Coming soon.
Where’s Navattic at with all this? As it stands, they do not support any comparable features.
Next up, we have Demo Hub: one of Storylane’s flagship features to address multiple buyer personas and use-cases in one place with galleries and playlists of demos. Galleries help marketers showcase a library of bite-sized product demos on their website (without overwhelming early stage prospects) while playlists help sales and presales teams share curated demo experiences with later stage prospects.
Navattic does not support any comparable feature to date. As it stands, Navattic’s response to Demo Hub is Demodash, an agency that charges as much as $ per demo to create demo centers for their customers.
Another key differentiator is Storylane's lineup of native apps. We’re the only demo automation vendors to support apps for Gmail, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Desktop (Mac).
These quality of life improvements are designed especially for sales teams to personalize and share demos without logging into Storylane (plus, easier change management is always nice).
You might be noticing a pattern here: To date, Navattic does not support this functionality — and given their focus on a limited set of use-cases, nor do we believe that they plan to. More on this next.
Most demo automation vendors sell to a specific function. Saleo sells to sales. Consensus sells to pre-sales. And Navattic? Well they primarily sell to marketers. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it can be a limiting factor when you’re looking to scale demo operations across departments and use-cases.
Storylane is specifically designed for horizontal adoption across marketing, pre-sales, sales, and even customer success, product, and development teams. The differences in product functionality highlighted above (coupled with under the radar features such as secure demo sharing and personalized links for campaigns) are testament to this claim.
As for which demo automation software is easier to use, we’ll let numbers do the talking.
"Storylane makes it much easier to organize content with its tagging system for chapters and sections. While Navattic allows labeling, it lacks searchability and filtering capabilities, which becomes crucial when managing multiple chapters. I particularly appreciate how Storylane structures chapters with their own dedicated build sections. In contrast, with Navattic, when I created an 80-step process, it stretched into one long, horizontal sequence that required constant scrolling back and forth. Storylane's more concise organization makes me much more excited to build out product demos” - A customer when asked about how Storylane compared to Navattic
Upon initial inspection, Storylane is (slightly) more expensive per plan than Navattic. A closer look, however, reveals that we offer several features in our lower tier plans. To name a few:
If you really think about it, this probably translates to better bang for your buck. But what about the whole “unlimited seats” deal? Sounds great, sure — but how sustainable is it really? As your organization (and demo requirements) start to scale, it’s unrealistic to expect the same support for a 5 seat plan as a 200 seat plan. Another reason why Storylane’s value-based pricing makes more sense for the long run.
Edit: Recently, Navattic has also started capping their seats per plan. Goes to show that as a commercial model, the whole unlimited seats approach probably didn't work out as intended.
And there you have it! Both Navattic and Storylane are leading demo automation softwares — but when you break it down, it’s hard to argue against the latter. Storylane's objectively in the clear for most buying considerations: functionality, versatility, ease-of-use, and commercials.
It may not feel like it (especially to us), but demo automation has only been around for a handful of years. As a category, we’re still in nascent stages. Unlike with established verticals such as CRMs or project management tools, it’s on younger companies like ours to innovate and push the envelope in these “early days” of demo automation.
Nitty-gritty comparisons aside, it’s worth sharing that Storylane has been at the forefront of this since day one. With category-first initiatives like self-serve PLG, Demo Hub, and more recently, Lily AI — innovation continues to be at the heart of our business. If you decide to go with Storylane, we hope the question “what's next?” excites you as much as it excites us!
1.Best Navattic Alternatives For Every Demo Need
From day one, our mission has been to simplify B2B buying and selling. When we launched in , we recognized that product demos – a key touchpoint in most customer journeys – generated undue friction for buyers and sellers alike. From both a creation and discovery stand point, demos fell flat in terms of ease-of-use, accessibility, and scalability. This gap is exactly what we set out to close with Storylane.
Storylane's growth has always been marked by industry-first innovations. We began by introducing interactive demos in . The goal was to help teams build quick and simple demos for a range of marketing and sales use-cases. Soon enough, this put us on the map as the fastest, easiest-to-use demo automation tool in the market.
Next, in , we became the first self-serve platform in our category. Here, our goal was to democratize access to demo automation for marketing, sales, and presales teams of all sizes. Today, we work with over companies ranging from early-stage startups to industry giants such as Microsoft, Gong, and Cognism.
Last year, in , we recognized that one demo wasn’t going to cut it. After all, B2B purchase decisions involve multiple buyer personas, use-cases, and product lines. In such cases, it only makes sense to share multiple, context-specific demos with prospects.
After much anticipation, we launched Demo Hub; another category-first innovation designed to share multiple demos as galleries or playlists.
We’ve done well to get to where we are today — but we know there’s still a ton of scope to simplify B2B buying and selling for everyone involved. We realize that:
And so, in our attempt to address these all-too-common gaps in the buying experience, we're thrilled to announce Storylane’s boldest innovation yet: Lily, your demo automation agent.
Lily is a demo automation agent built for both buyers and sellers. She represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll be thinking about demo creation and discovery going forward, bringing in an agentic approach to Storylane’s existing line of demo automation products.
1. Create with AI: Simply capture your product with Storylane's browser extension and leave the rest to us. Lily will create and optimize demos in a single click — complete with product-specific guides, annotations, and voiceovers.
2. AI Avatars: Pick from dozens of avatars — or make one of yourself. Share a script and generate studio-quality presenter videos in seconds. No camera, edits, or redos needed.
3. AI Voiceovers: Speak your audience’s language — literally. Generate studio-quality voiceovers in over 60 diverse voices and 25 languages.
4. AI HTML Editor: Customize demos on the fly to meet your prospect's unique needs. Edit text, images, and graphs with just simple, code-free prompts — Lily does the rest.
All this? Just the beginning.
In March, Lily will evolve to support autonomous, contextual demo discovery for buyers. Imagine prospects exploring your product, right on your website, through intelligent conversations with Lily — getting exactly the information they need, when they need it — without any of the friction associated with traditional sales touchpoints.
In short, Lily will be a 24/7 tour guide — equipped with as much product knowledge as your best sales rep — to support buyers with contextual, self-serve product discovery.
As we launch Lily, we're more committed than ever to our founding mission: eliminating friction in B2B buying and selling. We believe agentic demo automation represents the next frontier in B2B sales enablement, moving beyond static product demos to intelligent product experiences.
To our customers who've been part of this journey – thank you. Your feedback and trust have been instrumental in shaping not just Storylane, but the future of demo automation. And to those considering how to make their demo experience more effective and engaging – welcome to the era of agentic demo automation.
The future of product demonstrations is here, and we couldn't be more excited to help you tell your product's story in ways never before possible.
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