It is a
genius move. Their real estate leases and operations are surprisingly cheap when it comes to brick and mortar because the footprint is so small. And they have completely eliminated the most dangerous and costly aspect of B&M: inventory management. The more stores you have, the more fractured your inventory is. Every location adds incremental safety stock. Safety stock in fashion, where each color/size combo is a unique sku, tends to be at least an order of magnitude greater than the mean forecasted sales...much higher for the high end stores where an out of stock situation is a major hit to your brand image.
Pure e-commerce fashion companies have a huge advantage in inventory management because they aggregate their inventory in a single warehouse instead of spreading it out amongst hundreds of retail stores. But they have struggled because of concerns about fit. People tend to fall into two categories when it comes to buying clothes online: 1) Buy it anyway, try it on, and return everything that doesn't fit, and 2) Don't buy at all. #1 is extremely costly because reverse logistics is extremely costly (personal experience is 3-10x more expensive than equivalent forward logistics). #2 is a no-revenue situation.
Bonobos is doing something risky, sure...but it is novel and, in my opinion, has a lot of merit. They let people find what fits, and then they can buy as little or as much as they want, in any color, fabric, or print combination that they want online...and they have eliminated the reverse logistics and reduced inventory working capital by several orders of magnitude.
And sure, they can't be everyone's target market. Nobody has ever succeeded at that in fashion. But what they do have for a target market is extremely powerful: Professional men. And they happen to go back for more every time because they love the product.