Hey there,

My wife is in the process of starting a business and I'm doing a lot of helping for her as well as I have a little bit more experience with business planning, etc.

That being said I'm having a hard time with the market research sales forecasts section. She is looking at starting a female-positive and sex-positive adult toy store and while I can throw together estimates, but in no way can I guarantee that they would be correct in any way, shape, or form. I know of other shops around the country, however none where the market conditions are anywhere near the same as here and I can't imagine that any of the local stores (of which there are three, but based on some market research that I've done is definitely not too saturated and we would be not too hard pressed to find patrons) would be willing to give up their sales numbers.

I looked for sales numbers online even to purchase state/local averages but was unable to find a market niche that would have included those numbers without being lumped in as "miscellaneous" and not even helping out at all.

I was wondering how one would go about even trying to get numbers like that... the only ways that I have thought of were to build it into a research survey but that could overly inflate the size of said survey based on the variety of products that would have to be sold and the subsets of products within each type of product - the other way I have thought is generally just hanging out in the competition's store for a long while watching people go in and out and seeing the average amount of what they are purchasing and what prodcuts they are purchasing - the final way would be to have one of my friends - a business major - see if they can sweet talk them into helping them out with a school project but that's far too dishonest for me to even entertain the idea of for longer than a short period of time.

I have a feeling that the best course of action would be to include any questions regarding past purchases into the market research survey that I will be distributing to people around town.

We are also having a hard time thinking of a non-sketchy name that hasn't been taken already. Any help on that front would be appreciated as well.