The price of everyone

A woman in Manama starts selling abayas online from her spare room. Her early designs are unusual: sharp sleeves, an unexpected lining colour, a cut that some people find too bold.

The first buyers are people who wanted exactly that. They found her because nobody else was doing it, and they tell their friends for the same reason.

Then the shop grows. More followers, more orders, buyers from Riyadh and Muscat and Kuwait. With every hundred new customers, the requests shift a little. Could the sleeves be softer? Is there a black lining? Something more classic for an older sister? Each request is reasonable. Each sale is real.

A year later the shop is three times the size and its best sellers are the plainest pieces she makes. The bold cuts are still listed, but they sit at the bottom of the page.

Nobody forced this. It is arithmetic. A small group of customers can be unusual, because they chose you for being unusual. A large enough group of customers stops being a group with a shared taste and starts being a sample of everyone. And everyone, on average, wants something average.

That is not a failure. Her plain abayas are better made than most, and her buyers are well served. Growing raised the standard for a lot of people who would otherwise have bought something worse.

But it is worth seeing the trade clearly, because it rarely announces itself. Chasing as many customers as can be found is also a decision about what the work will become. Past a certain size, the middle is not a risk. It is where the numbers go.

Some sellers want that. Some, seeing it early enough, would choose to stay a little smaller, and stay strange.