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.

I had a hard time getting information from competitors. I had to get creative. I called several claiming I was from business journal online and writing a story about the industry, got a lot of information that way. Also, and it won't help in your case, but I took my friends daughter to another competitor and had her interview the store manager for a class project. The manager was very helpful this way. Not an honest route, but sharing information doesn't hurt anyone. You also may find a hard time getting any traditional financing as your business would be considered a "sin" business. Good Luck.

I know all about hard times finding things for our business. It's rather pathetic in my opinion even with city ordinances. We can't have the business where our target market is because of zoning and yet the city complains about the amount of vacancy in that district.

My wife wants to file for a variance (as we have a verbal commitment from someone saying that he'd be fine with us moving into his space) with the zoning commission to see if we can sneak in as a non-conformity but I highly doubt that it would be approved and if not then we could go to the city commission but I have a feeling that we'd probably end up being crucified before they would budge even though we have a whole slew of supporters.

Not only is it hard to find space though, it's hard to find people who will provide all sorts of other services, lawyers, accountants, web designers. I had one of my high school friends flat out say not to me to paying him to design a website for me because he didn't want to have his name associated with "that sort" of company.

I think that part of it is because people don't quite get what we're going for - we're not looking at opening a dingy dark flourescent lit shop full of shrink wrapped products, but the complete opposite. We are looking at opening a sex positive, open and inviting space focusing on education and safety. We are looking at opening something where you can handle products to feel the weight, texture, etc. before making a purchase, something clean and well lit.

You'd think that people would understand that we are looking at starting a boutique, not something sketchy hence the word "boutique" in the name.

So, we have access to a number of other shops that are quite like ours that would be able to provide us with pictures of what we are looking at opening - do you think that would possibly help take us up an notch and hopefully sway to get the stereotypical image out of their minds if we DO decide to apply for a variance?