Why am I scrolling through 100 pages of the same desk?

In search of a new desk, I was looking through the Wayfair website the other day, and it brought me down a deep thought rabbit hole about shopping decision fatigue. Wayfair has a massive selection of inventory, and it's really easy to get lost scrolling through seemingly endless pages of desks that all look pretty much identical. At one point, I was looking for brown sheets and found myself comparing 5 different options of Wayfair sheets that all looked the exact same. When there are barely any differentiating features, what good is it doing for the consumer to have a million different choices of the same option? While I'm sure there's a reasonable answer to this, from the shopper's perspective, it just feels silly and overwhelming, and personally really only detracts from my shopping experience.

The same problem shows up across fashion brands, too. You can scroll through ASOS or Zara for hours and not make it to the end of their inventories. For a lot of these brands, not only do they have a huge inventory, but it's also extremely redundant. If you look up "white tank top" on H&M, 8 pages of results come up, and about a third of them are completely interchangeable. The odds of anyone actually scrolling through all 8 pages are low, so what's the point of having that many nearly identical products? If I had to guess, I'd say most people are choosing the first or second satisfactory option, or else scrolling through a couple pages of results and getting distracted, bored, or overwhelmed, and not even buying anything. Amazon is the most extreme version of this, with seemingly infinite pages of the exact same product.

Against this backdrop, we're seeing a rise in small, curated businesses.

I live in New York City, one place where specialized stores really shine. You see this a lot with food, where you go to Apollo Bagels for one of their four menu items, or Mary O's for the one thing on their menu (scones with jam and butter). The same thing shows up in fashion, where every corner of the Lower East Side has a niche concept store or curated vintage shop. You walk into these stores and know within 30 seconds whether your taste aligns with the brand's. The collection typically feels cohesive, yet each piece is still differentiated from the others. These smaller stores likely drive away consumers who don't connect with anything in such a small collection, but they also build a fiercely loyal base among the ones who do, which, in the end, seems more valuable than trying to appeal to everyone. It lets the company build a distinct identity and connect with its audience more deeply.

What actually makes these specialized stores work? In an age of endless products, it feels refreshing to walk into a place that focuses on just a few things. There's a certain credibility that comes with only selling a handful of items, and consumers feel like they can trust the brand to do those few things well. These smaller stores also signal care. The brand clearly invested time into choosing a small, deliberate collection rather than throwing everything on a website, and that builds trust both in the individual pieces and in the brand's taste as a whole. Over time, that trust makes shopping easier: instead of sifting through a million products to find what fits your taste, you can go straight to the brand you already trust, without needing to form an opinion on each specific piece.

Watching this trend toward curation made me think about how larger brands try to tap into it. Massive brands like Zara obviously aren't going to slash their inventory just to signal restraint to consumers. That said, I do think some companies could stand to cut down on redundancies (H&M selling 10 versions of essentially the same white tank top, for instance), which would ease consumer fatigue while giving the product line more of a sense of intention.

So why do these fashion brands carry such large inventories in the first place? Looking at all the explanations for this, a lot of it boils down to laziness. Brands put out a million versions of the same item and let consumers sort out which one perfectly fits their style or needs. They can get away with this because they have the brand recognition and stability to know that some customers will sift through and pick something. But to consumers who want a brand with discerning taste, this strategy, putting out a million products and seeing what sticks, completely extinguishes any sense of intention. It also comes across as a risk-averse move. Instead of putting effort behind one product the brand actually believes in, they toss out a bunch and basically just hope for the best. While this may have advantages from a business standpoint, it diminishes the brand's credibility and makes it seem less confident in what it's selling.

Clearly, big brands and small curated businesses are taking different approaches here, and it's the smaller businesses that seem to be winning when it comes to earning customer loyalty and trust. I have a lot of respect for these small brands that stay true to their tastes and strengths, releasing only small collections of items that genuinely reflect what they like and stand for. In turn, they attract consumers who feel that same alignment, and it makes me wonder how much of a brand's largeness is actually working against it in a moment when consumers increasingly want to feel chosen, not just sold to.