Niche market business model for Murano glass

We had the pleasure of visiting Murano glass making demonstration.

I was amazed by the beauty of glass art and was even more stunned by the price tag! A glass vest can be priced easily over 10,000 Euros.

Clearly, they are focusing on high-end customers and collectors, a niche market business model. Their glassware is handmade exclusively, emphasizing on uniqueness, value and customization. They showed no interests in mass production or automation. Their quantity is low, yet profit margin is high to make their business sustainable from global mass production and competition of non-unique products. This shares similarity of Italy carmaker, Ferrari.

They do have challenges. Their niche business model limits their size of business and growth space. Their manual production is depending on highly skilled and talented workers, which become rare due to amount of training and talent needed, again limit their business size and growth.