Sublime

The Bonobos “Guideshops” (which now belong to Walmart!), for example, don’t really sell anything. If you like something in the store, they’ll ship it to you later. The main idea is for people to try things on and get advice. They’re using their stores to surface the discovery process, not manage inventory.

You walk down your high street. What do you prefer to see there? The economist will say: Walmart, Best Buy, the Gap. Scale economies — cheaper prices — better for “consumers”! But the human being will say: an independent cafe, a good bookshop, a boutique clothing store. Why? Because they offer many things that mega scale organizations don’t.

Still trying to maximize the use of a small store, I looked for other categories that met the Four Tests: high value per cubic inch, high rate of consumption; easily handled; and something in which we could be outstanding in terms of price or assortment.

What we’ve not yet addressed is the $1.25 billion consumer nontraditional US book industry—books created by individuals or entities that are not commercial publishers—that accounted for 297 million units sold in 2016. This is a full 20 percent of the roughly $6 billion traditional US trade book market.

Consider the Interface Corporation of Georgia, now an $800 million carpet supplier. It used to sell carpets; now it leases them, installing carpet tiles rather than whole carpets. Interface realized that 20 percent of any carpet receives 80 percent of the wear. Normally a carpet is replaced when most of it is still perfectly good. Under Interface’s