A Niche Is Not About Being Small

From a hollow in the wall to the words nobody searches for

Lately I have been using the word "niche" quite a lot myself. At some point I started wondering what it actually means, so I looked it up. Or rather, I asked an AI. We have reached the age where you no longer have to search for a word. You just ask.

What set me wondering was probably this.

"That's a niche business you have there."

People say it to me now and then. I know there is no malice in it. Still, something small catches every time I hear it. It sounds like a compliment, and it also sounds like being told my business is small. Since it can be taken either way, I never know what to say back.

What I found out is that the thing catching on me was not the tone of the person speaking. It was something the word had dropped on its way into Japanese.

A hollow in the wall

Niche began as a term in architecture. You thicken a wall, hollow out part of it, and stand a statue or a vase in the hollow. It is that rounded recess you see in the walls of churches.

In English you at least get to argue about how to say it. Nitch or neesh, and people take sides depending on which side of the Atlantic they grew up on. In Japanese it arrives as nitchi and there is nothing left to argue about.

Follow the etymology and you reach the French nicher, and behind that the Latin nidus. A nest. The verb means to build one.

So by the root of it, a niche is a nest. Which means that when people tell me I run a niche business, they are more or less telling me I run a nesting business. They are not wrong. I sit at home alone, weaving baskets.

The point worth holding on to is this. A hollow is not a niche because it is small. It is a niche because the statue that goes into it and the hollow itself share the same dimensions and the same shape. Too large and you are left with a foolish looking hole. Too small and the statue will not go in. It is a question of fit, not a question of size.

Not overlapping

Biologists carried the word into ecology in the early twentieth century. Joseph Grinnell used it in 1917 in the sense of a place, and Charles Elton used it in 1927 in the sense of a role. That is the standard account.

Grinnell and Elton. I should admit that the only Elton I actually knew was Elton John.

What a creature eats, at what height, in what surroundings, at what hour: the whole combination is that creature's niche. And here again, smallness is not one of the conditions. The condition is that it does not fully overlap with anything else. That is the whole of it. There is even a principle holding that two species sharing a niche completely cannot coexist.

So the ecological niche says the same thing as the architectural one. Fit. And nothing else able to take its place.

The word that became "gap"

When the term arrived in Japanese as business vocabulary, it was translated as sukima sangyo and sukima shijo, literally gap industry and gap market. The translation stuck.

Incidentally, I have yet to see anyone look pleased at being told they run a gap industry.

Once you say gap, it turns into a question of size. The narrow space left between two large things. The space that is empty because nobody goes there. Not the main event.

What niche market was meant to convey is a market that matches a particular demand exactly, no more and no less. In Japanese it drifted toward small business, the sort the large companies will not bother with. What had been catching on me in "that's a niche business" was, I think, the width of that drift.

As an aside, Czech gets by with a single word. Nika is the hollow in the wall, nika is the animal's place in the ecosystem, and nika is the spot in the market as well. Over there the word never had to split.

So is my own business a niche

I weave baskets out of PP band, the strapping tape meant for tying up parcels. I buy the material, make the tools, write the instructions, and sell what comes of it. All of it alone.

Did I aim for a gap in the market? No, and I could not have. I never studied the market long enough to aim at anything. I noticed that packing strap could be woven, wove some, found it stronger than I expected, and kept at it until people began asking to buy. It has always gone in that order.

The closest thing to the truth is that there was nowhere else to put it. When you set a statue into a hollow, you are not hunting for a gap. You are looking at the statue in your hands and the hollow in front of you, and checking whether the two shapes agree.

The words nobody searches for

The same story turns up somewhere else entirely.

When I read the access logs, the words people arrive by are few. PP band, basket weaving, how to weave, how to make. Combinations of those, over and over.

The number of searches is not large. A handful a day. I do not expect to ever have any dealings with the verb "to go viral." Set against the big words of the world it rounds to nothing.

And yet what the person typing those words wants and what I have put on the page match almost exactly. Nobody lands there to browse. They came to weave a basket out of PP band, and for no other reason.

A search box is a hollow too. For any given set of words somebody types, there is usually only one shape of page that fits. It is not a matter of numbers but of fit. Seen that way, being searched for rarely stops being a defect at all.

You notice the hollow afterwards

In the end, a niche is not smallness. It is fit.

One more thing occurred to me while I was reading. A hollow in a wall only becomes a niche once a statue stands in it. An empty hollow is just a hole.

I would not tell anyone looking for their place in the world to aim for a gap. I do not believe it works that way. You take what is in your hands and try setting it somewhere it might go. You keep doing that for some years, and only on looking back do you realise, ah, so that was a hollow.

That is how it went for me.

So the next time somebody tells me I have a niche business, I have decided to answer like this.

It is not a gap. The shape simply happens to fit.

Then again

Having written all that, I am afraid I am about to knock it over.

I am not half as certain as that sounded. There are plenty of other people weaving PP band baskets. People who teach it, people who sell it. Held against that earlier condition, that nothing else can take its place, I am not remotely a niche. In the language of ecology I am in one hollow with a crowd of others, all elbowing each other.

I know the shape of the hollow now. Whether I fit into it neatly is another matter. Something always seems to catch at the corners.

If there is comfort anywhere in the architecture, it is this. You can cut the statue down to fit the hollow, and you can also cut the hollow to fit the statue. The church masons, I suspect, did both. If you do not fit, take something off one side or the other.

I have three years left before I turn sixty. There is still a little time for cutting.