Ask HN: Room for innovation in retail niches? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Room for innovation in retail niches?

4 pointsdnsworks6 comments

Any fat man knows what I'm talking about. We've got three options: Custom tailor, casual male xl, or rochester big & tall. Our clothing options begin at 2-3x the cost of a non-fat guy's equivalent .. For 20-30% more fabric, and the same amount of effort.

Camera stores are another one. If you've tried to buy a hot camera in the past year, like the Canon 5D Mark 2, or the 1D Mark V, then you know what it's like. The smaller shops tend to have some in stock when Amazon and the 2-3 larger players are empty.. But so many of the smaller shops are playing some pretty awful bait and switch games.

It seems that there must be a better way for both of these niches, and others.

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I think one of the most fascinating and under-utilized trends in the retail world is pop-up stores: http://trendwatching.com/trends/POPUP_RETAIL.htm

Combining this concept with serious statistical analysis of when people most often make purchases within different niches, and well-executed pre- ("coming soon...") and post- ("You missed us, but you can still buy online at...") store duration marketing campaigns, I think stores within many more niches could make a sizable profit.

Now's a particularly good time to do this because of the increased availability of prime retail space. Nation-wide there are malls with a larger number of unfilled spaces for rent due to the recession.

Here's a B&M retail idea I thought of recently: "Green Home" a sustainable/organic/green alternative to Home Depot & Lowes. I think the Whole Foods approach could be applied to the lumbar yard: give DIY homeowners a feel-good alternative at a premium. The shop would feature lots of bamboo, solar panels, and products from companies like Terracycle (http://www.terracycle.net/).

For your large people idea, don't forget tall people too.

Tall people actually seem pretty well served. Big & Tall clothing really means "For tall people, but we'll make sure fat people don't go naked if they can stand hawaiian shirts"

Tall men may be well served, but tall women are not. Women have specialty stores/departments for short ("petite") or fat sizes. Tall thin women can have quite a challenge finding clothes that fit.

I wonder if tall clothing has the same dimensional problems as mass-manufactured fat clothes. I've spoken to a few friends who are in the fashion industry, and what I've discovered is that as clothes get larger, the proportions are increased linearly .. This would work well if people's bodies were squares, but not so much given that ratios change vary dramatically from one person to the next.

The process itself is pretty amusing. You take a template for a pair of jeans and put it on an enlarger. You enlarge that template some percentage for every increase in size. Everything gets bigger, including the pockets. Let me tell you, I can fit a bottle of champagne in each pants pocket.

Maybe the room for innovation here is something along what Nike was trying to do with it's in-store 3d body scanners for jeans a few years ago. Apparently that process failed because women didn't like seeing accurate visualizations of themselves, since everybody has body issues thanks to the media.

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