Niche markets are...well...niche.

A couple brilliant insights after 40 years of retail. 

If you want lots of customers, locate where there are lots of people.

If you want lots of sales to lots of customers, sell what appeals to the largest number of customers.  

I think most businesses start out in the opposite direction. They locate in a place where they think they can be the main focus of that area. For instance, the one store in a small town. Or a "neighborhood" store.

It took opening stores in Sisters, Redmond and two in Bend to realize I was wrong about that. In fact, each of the two stores in Bend did better than the store in Sisters and Redmond, for the simple reason that there were many more people to draw from.

There is built-in limit, a ceiling, to how much business you can do in a small town. You become dependent on a small core group of customers, which creates problems. You have to constantly cater to that small group--in essence, you become hostage to them. But more importantly, you aren't drawing from a large pool of possible customers.

For a long time, the only reason Bend was feasible was because of the tourist trade. That's still more or less true. 

Meanwhile, I was also selling a niche product, mostly comics, but surrounding them with other niche products such as card games, toys, games. 

Even new books were for the most part designed at first to appeal to customers I already had. 

But Bend was growing, downtown Bend was booming, so I finally brought in the full range of new books, and all I can say is--wow. 

Turns out that having a product that appeals to a large part of the population is the way to go. 

There was always going to be a glass ceiling on the niche products, even if we were doing better because of the increased foot traffic. But combining the increased foot traffic with a product that has a wide appeal, and bamm, you realize that the glass ceiling has just risen.

One downside, I suppose, is that you pay for the increased costs of locating in a city or a downtown area. But having access to many multiples the numbers of foot-traffic customers will usually pay for that. It's a mistake to move away from a busy location to save a little rent. As I put it, "Don't trade $2000 in rent reductions for $10,000 in customer loss in foot traffic."

The other downside to carrying mass-appeal product is increased competition from the Big Boys--the corporate chainstores. Yet, if you are in busy location and you're doing a good job, you'll still get a slice of the market. A small slice of a huge market can be better than a large slice of a small market.

A third downside is that the producers of product that has mass appeal are often difficult to work with. When I first approached the book distributor, Ingrams, a couple of decades ago, they didn't want anything to do with a comic shop. They discovered differently, in a big way, but meanwhile I struggled to find access to books.

Forget toys. It's almost impossible to get a reliable supply chain for toys--they really only want to deal in large quantities. Games are available, but the mass appeal games such as Monopoly and Scrabble are so cheap in the chain stores that I literally could save money by bypasssing the distributors and buying from Walmart. (Which I refuse to do--thus, we carry niche games, Euro-games mostly.) 

So, yeah, there are actual reasons I didn't get into a broader appeal product line until later in my career--but, boy has it been an eye-opener. It's possible it played out the only way it could have played out--that is, I ordered more mass appeal product as it became available to me.

But I also think I was scared away from new books for a long time because of all the horror stories I heard about how hard they were to sell and how Amazon and Barnes & Noble were putting all the bookstores out of business.

Turns out, at least so far, new book are much easier to sell than "order in advance, blind guesses on numbers, one chance to get them, non-returnable, changes of artists and writers at any time" comics. I still love comics and have no reason not to keep selling them, but they are a niche product and always will be. 

Which is a big part of their appeal. 

Meanwhile, I'm hoping that selling lots of new books will help sell all the niche product too. Which seems to be happening. Best of both worlds, I do believe.