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> Why can't you build a business around selling "industrial-scale" artsy/customizable stuff?

That's essentially what old-school furniture & home stores do. There's nothing wrong with that but I think that market is already at capacity, competition is fierce and margins are low.

I also suspect that a lot of the industrial-scale producers & copycats use the artisans as their R&D department and only copy their successful designs. In this case, the innovation still comes from the small-scale independent sellers, which if they are driven off the platform would eventually kill off the industrial-scale sellers and copycats as they'd no longer have anything to copy (and designing in-house might make them unprofitable).




>That's essentially what old-school furniture & home stores do. There's nothing wrong with that but I think that market is already at capacity, competition is fierce and margins are low.

Eh, I can't think of a directly comparable site. The closest would be something like Pier 1, but there's no customization there and it's all sold by Pier 1.




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