A few people who want it badly

A woman in Dubai makes wooden toys at a workbench in her spare room and sells them online.

She has two directions open to her, and they pull against each other.

She could make something a great many parents would like a little: a cheerful stacking set, priced to be an easy gift, the kind of thing people add to a basket without much thought and forget about afterwards. Lots of buyers, each of them only mildly attached.

Or she could make something a small number of people want badly: a puzzle so well made that families keep it for the next child, in the woods and finishes a certain sort of parent goes looking for and then talks about at the park.

Most small sellers end up with neither. The product is pleasant enough to be bought now and then and not good enough to be sought out. It is too ordinary to sell in quantity and too unremarkable to be loved. That middle is crowded, and it is where most shops quietly stall.

Almost nobody gets both. The thing a crowd wants mildly is rarely the thing a small circle cannot do without, because the choices that make one work tend to spoil the other.

None of this is luck. Each of the two good outcomes comes from a long run of decisions about materials, price, photographs and who the shop is speaking to, made on purpose and kept to. Drifting gets her neither.

But if she picks, and keeps picking, she has a real chance at one.