Niche

“Go niche” - or so they say.

The evidence is always the same.

Sportswear. Nike, the cultural behemoth, is losing cultural ground to Salomon, to Alo, to ON. The trail-running brand, the wellness brand, the precision-running brand. None of them tried to be everything like Nike. All of them are beating the giant where it matters.

Broad is dead, long live niche. Case closed.

Then everyone runs the same play. Pick a corner, go deep, build a world. Go niche. Ironically, the advice has become so universally commoditized that it stopped being a niche itself.

When everyone crowds to a corner that they deem “niche”, specificity stops being the edge. Which raises the question that the Salomon-citers fail to consider: if narrow isn’t the scarce variable, what is?

A niche is not a topic. It’s an economy.

Salomon didn’t win because trail running was a smaller topic than Nike’s market. It won because trail runners are people who spend- on gear, repeatedly, with identity and money both on the line every time they buy. Alo didn’t win solely on wellness as a theme. It won on a specific woman who purchases the entire aesthetic, season after season, and feels correctly identified by it.

The specificity is what you see. The buyers are what makes it an operational function.

When these brands get handed to you as evidence that “narrow beats broad”, the lesson being drawn is the wrong one. Salomon isn’t proof that specific wins. It’s proof that specificity, aimed at a world with money in it, wins.

Most people focus on the first half. And yet, the second half is the actual game. 

Most creators going niche right now fail to take economies into consideration.

They pick the niche they love - an emotionally driven choice. They spend years building genuine depth, a real community, an audience that talks to each other - inside a world that has no brands that need access to it and no members with anything to spend.

They took the common advice: “Go niche”. They went deep. They got specific. They built the world. And they built it somewhere with no economy in it.

That’s not a “pointier” business. It’s a cage you spent years constructing, beautifully, around a room with nothing in it.

The question isn’t “broad or niche”, but “market or no market”.

A niche creator with fifty thousand residents of a world whose brands are desperate to enter is a different product than a broad creator with a million mildly-adjacent followers.

But a niche creator with fifty thousand residents of a world no one is trying to reach is just a broad creator who got smaller on purpose.

The depth was never the point; only a means to an end. The depth is table stakes. The economy is the point.

“Follow your passion into a niche.”

The uncomfortable truth is that this advice is how most creators will lose. The niche you love is often saturated, broke, or both. The niches that compound are frequently the ones that look boring from the outside, but often have a dense market.

Specialty coffee, independent wholesale, a construction business few people find interesting - these aren’t winning solely because they’re narrow. They’re winning because they’re narrow and the people inside them transact.

“Go niche” is the easy half. That’s merely a hobby with a posting schedule.

Choosing a niche with an economy inside it is the half most fail to consider, because it forces an uncomfortable question.