(Firstly, I did set apachii hair as a master file)

I've been taking different approaches to trying to create modded appearance NPCs in Skyrim. I felt like the simplest starting point would be to just duplicate Aela, rename, and give the new-name Aela an apachii hairstyle. I encountered two issues though. One issue I had was that any apachii hairstyle I selected on the CK would hover above the new Aela duplicates head, while her head below was bald. The other issue I had was getting errors when I tried to just move her into the game and see if it looked okay there. Here are the steps I went through...

1. saved mod as anticipated new follower's name
2. opened skyrim.esm, update.esm, and apachiihair.esm as data files, and also .esp as the active file
3. Duped Aela, and re-named the duplicate
4. Irrelevant customization (making follower unique, removing Companions faction, removing scripts, etc.)
5. Under chargen parts, changed hair to an apachii hair option
6. In the preview, the new hair showed up floating high above the head. This happened for multiple hair options
7. saved the mod with the floating apachi hair and re-opened the CK and mod, but it still showed with hair floating above the head
8. Tried more apachii hair options after the re-load, but it didn't fix it
9. For the sake of testing in game, I tried to move the actor to a game cell (whiterun's temple I think)
10. Moving actor into the cell caused an error. I don't remember what it said specifically, but it said something about the meshes and hair.

Does anything stand out as a cause for my floating hair and errors? Would it streamline things at all if I tried creating a racial preset appearance instead of an actor with that appearance?