Zazzle Dazzles

What would you get if you combined a Long Tail E-tail strategy with a user-contribution Web 2.0 strategy? It might resemble something like Zazzle, a site where artisans create designs for tee-shirts, mousepads, handbags. The Zazzle platform offers support for artist producers, and a collection of unique items for the consumer.

The long tail is basically the idea that one can also sell a small volume of a large number of products instead of a merely selling a large volume of a small number of products. Think about the number of titles sold at Amazon, as compared to the number at your local Barnes and Noble store. The idea was used as the title of a book by Chris Anderson, originally an article in Wired magazine, and it was in turn inspired by a paper by Brynjolfsson, Hu and Smith (2003).

The approach leverages what networks do best, which is perform the classic retail function of "matching". When you add to that the ability to empower small sellers to produce the goods that go in the tail, that strikes me as a very nice niche for Zazzle.

Reference

Brynjolfsson, Erik, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith (2003), "Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers," Management Science, 49 (11), 1580-1596 [PDF].