The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin

Several hyper-specialist shops I know in Munich:<p>- balloon shops seem to do really well because we have several here and every major city seems to have one<p>- foam shop for when you need to fix your upholstery<p>- venetian blind store which only sells the vertical kind<p>- <i>Ketten Wild</i> was a chain shop that only sold chains but chains in all forms and sizes<p>- <i>la porcelaine blanche&#x27;s</i> slogan is <i>&quot;only china, only white&quot;</i> and that is what they do<p>- elk shop for everything elk related - not that we have any elks in Germany but elks are cute<p>- Schrauben Preisinger sells only screws. They claim they have 30000 different types in their store and this is absolutely credible. A few years ago I was there to get some M1 screws for a project when I witnessed an interesting exchange between another customer and a salesman. The customer had brought a screw with a quite wide thread. It was a straight screw, not tapered and not a wood screw, just with an obviously non-metric thread. He inquired if they had this type of screw in stock. The salesman answered slightly offended that this was a shop for machine screws and they would not sell <i>furniture</i> screws.<p>Also button shops are super useful. If you lose a button you go there with your piece of clothing and they will find a suitable replacement in no time. I never visited the one in Berlin but the one in Munich saved me good money.<p>EDIT: I just remembered two more:<p>- Gummi bear shops are a bit like balloon shops. I don&#x27;t understand it but there seems to be enough demand to support several of them in a single city.<p>- Berlin&#x27;s Ampelmann. Maybe doesn&#x27;t quite fit into the category because it&#x27;s more of a tourist curiosity. On the other hand: A shop that only sells stuff related to the graphic design of a symbol on the traffic lights of a defunct state is quite hyper-specialized I guess.

For many many years there was a shop on Victoria street in Edinburgh that appeared to sell nothing but brooms and large balls of string - it was even mentioned in <i>Complicity</i> by Iain Banks.<p>Here are some pics of it:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edinphoto.org.uk&#x2F;0_MY_P_S&#x2F;0_my_photographs_shops_victoria_street_40_me03_jan_1992.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edinphoto.org.uk&#x2F;0_MY_P_S&#x2F;0_my_photographs_shops_...</a><p>Edit: Sad to say that I passed that shop for many years going to uni in the Grassmarket (both as a student and working there) and never went in!

I would assume that the decline of specialist shops is strongly correlated with rising rents for storefront properties. But with online shopping on the rise, maybe landlords (outside shopping malls and after some years to pass through the stages of grief) can accept that there just isn’t that much money in rents for storefronts anymore, and that specialist shops thereby can continue to exist.<p>Of course, the risk is that they will just tear it all down and convert it into lofts, office complexes or something instead, leaving <i>nothing</i> except lofts, office complexes and huge malls.

Hyper-specialization is everywhere if you ever step into any Asian country.<p>Indians even have last names based on their hyper-specialized occupation. I was in Thailand and I saw a tiny shop whose only job was to take old torn notes and exchange it for a new one by charging a small flat fee. I had an Indian friend that told me that specializations in old cities was also geographically organized. One part of street would only sell pressure cookers while another side would sell watering cans.

I live in Paris and you can find highly specialized shops too. Some shops only sell about three types of fabric, some others will sell only buttons, a certain type of leather or a special type of ink. I love getting in those shops and meeting the people who are really passionate about their visibly small yet huge niche. It always get wonderful once you start looking at the details.

&gt;<i>Instead of shutting up shop, Ghouneim relocated to humdrum Wittenau, a suburb of Berlin, and got some tape artists to decorate the facade of the new building. Footfall has naturally decreased, but 80% of his business comes from online sales and regular industrial clients, for whom Klebeband’s four employees cut and colour match tape of all varieties to order.</i><p>Sounds like they realize that people going &quot;Have you heard of the store that only sells stickytape?&quot; is great buzz marketing generator.<p>I assume they&#x27;d need space to store the tape to sell to their online and industrial clients, so why not stack it up next to a counter and make a little side cash from the consumer market?<p>(I also have noticed in Germany they&#x27;re much more cash-friendly, so I can totally see more people in DE preferring to go to a store and pay cash than submit PII like credit card and home address to purchase some sticky tape)

In Cambridge (UK), on an out-of-the-way side street, for many years there was a shop called &quot;Roll On Blank Tape&quot;.<p>I never understood how they could possibly do enough business to stay _in_ business, and always suspected that if you asked in just the right way they might sell you some ... not-blank tapes.<p>Boringly, the available evidence suggests that actually it&#x27;s just that the person who ran the shop was really interested in cassette tape and didn&#x27;t mind not making any money to speak of.

Another specialist Berlin shop to the list (modelmaking&#x2F;art materials and tools) and very famous amoung architects:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.modulor.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;store-berlin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.modulor.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;store-berlin&#x2F;</a>

I also find hyper-specialist shops in america wherever there is still cheap land enough for it. When I used to live in Buffalo, there were small shops- one specifically for new agey &quot;gypsy&quot; clothing, one for bath soap made in house, one for herbs for witchcraft, one that specialized in stones. I really enjoyed those places and miss them now how I live in NYC (although NYC has its own quirks- big gay ice cream is great!)

&gt; he worked part-time to build and sell his own ant terrariums, which he calls “formicariums”, from the insect’s Latin name.<p>That&#x27;s not just what he calls it, that&#x27;s the official name for them.

Nothing too surprising really. The largest the density of people living in the same place, the more very niche businesses find enough folks to generate a livelihood out of it. The only reason why such shops tend to disappear is when rents become too high - but then nowadays they have the opportunity to go online instead. Tokyo has lots of hyper-specialist shops in different areas of the city, too.

While it&#x27;s basically more of a cafe, I really like that a Brownie-specialized place opened here in Kyiv, Ukraine (called &quot;Veterano Brownie&quot;, a concept they took from &quot;Veterano Pizza&quot;, where only war veterans or forced migrants are hired). Always nice to see that something that you previously perceived as a treat of one type can be developed into a whole mini-company with lots of care and a variety of forms and tastes.

This doesn&#x27;t really make sense to me.<p>On the internet hyper-specialisation is obvious since space is virtually unlimited. But in real life, I mean, real estate is limited so why wouldn&#x27;t darwinian market forces make a shop with product diversity + epsilon out compete a shop with a more niche spectrum of products, until only walmart and such remains?

In Dublin, there was a shop that mostly just sold yeast until recently: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irishtimes.com&#x2F;life-and-style&#x2F;homes-and-property&#x2F;johnny-ronan-made-an-offer-they-had-no-difficulty-refusing-1.3396814" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irishtimes.com&#x2F;life-and-style&#x2F;homes-and-property...</a><p>It always looked closed; I walked past it for a decade or so every day without realising that it was still in business.<p>And then there’s the top floor of Stephens Green shopping center, which mostly just contains very strange specialised shops, with no visible customers.

It&#x27;s a trope: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;SeverelySpecializedStore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;SeverelySpeciali...</a>

This reminds me of when I was in Shenzhen&#x27;s Huaqiangbei area --- it&#x27;s mostly electronics, but you can find plenty of shops selling only varieties of one type of product.

FTA: <i>&quot;This is Antstore, the world’s first specialist ant shop, a business with around two dozen employees, a glass-cutting workshop, plastic and plaster modelling studios and a full-time social media manager.&quot;</i><p>This sounds like a Monty Python sketch brought to life.

I don&#x27;t know if its still there, but west Philadelphia (somewhere around 49th St.) had a Carrot Cake store. They made the best carrot cake I&#x27;ve ever had, and made nothing else.

I&#x27;ve been past a specialist umbrella shop [0] in London hundreds of times and it has always intrigued me, though I have never been inside. I&#x27;m not quite sure it&#x27;s in the same vein as the other speciality shops people are listing here though, since it has been there for almost 200 years and clearly targets the more discerning customer with high quality and bespoke items.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.james-smith.co.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.james-smith.co.uk&#x2F;</a>

Surely the obvious question is: is the high street shop really a justified expense? Surely all the sales are online? The more specialized the shop, the less one can hope to fulfill ones sales volume from people in physical cruising distance. The article doesn’t seem to address this, except for acknowledging that most sales are online.

The sitre of the meat textile shop is pretty interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aufschnitt.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aufschnitt.net&#x2F;</a>

This is a classic case of what happens when key parts of doing business have a low-cost and low barrier to entry. Diversity and interestingness take hold.

Yes, there is a balloon shop around the corner. They don&#x27;t have anything except balloons, but they go deep.

The headline asks: Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a><p>No. The Internet is.

With online retail, brick-and-mortar retail is no longer useful just for aggregating things into a location that you can go to buy them, except for things that can&#x27;t be shipped for cost or time reasons.<p>So the value of brick and mortar retail becomes the ability to get you exactly what you need, and this often involves human expertise which by its nature specializes.<p>The button store on the Upper East Side in New York City has a lady there who just hands you the button you need. You show her your jacket where the button got caught in a cab door, and she doesn&#x27;t even have to hunt -- she walks to one of her thousands of teeny drawers, and pulls out your exact button or something pretty damn close. In the article, the scotch tape guy knows exactly what scotch tape you need, and that&#x27;s the reason for his store existing. He could as easily have an office where he then orders you the tape online for drone delivery.

&gt; Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a><p>Although in this case I would say YES, that specialist shops are needed to combat Amazon being non specialist.

Yeah, the communists have destroyed this in the eastern part of Europe nearly perfectly<p>EDIT: Why am I getting downvoted for a factual, accepted, well researched and well known statement?

If only I wasn&#x27;t so boring; some interesting retail spaces have opened up in my area.

Is anyone else failing to see a legitimate need for sticky tape in tens of different colours? What about the shopping experience of the future, when such shops are destined to be the &quot;future of retail&quot;? Suddenly you are now spending an hour choosing between balloons of different shapes and colours or the perfectly matching button for your shirt. It&#x27;s an illusion of choice, fueling pointless production of variations of the same thing and targeting your attention and time.