The Market Too Small for Anyone Else to Bother Innovating In

Ask most founders where opportunity sits and they will point at large markets with soft incumbents.

Liz King found hers somewhere far less obvious, in clergy shirts a category so narrow and so settled that nobody had meaningfully redesigned the product in roughly a century and a half.

She launched into it in 2020 from her home in St. Louis, with a young family and no retail infrastructure behind her, and five years later the company is selling both wholesale and direct to consumer across the United States.

The story is worth examining not because the market is glamorous, but because the strategic conditions that made it winnable show up in hundreds of categories that founders routinely overlook.

Defining the Category Before Judging It

Clerical clothing is supplied by a small number of specialist outfitters, several of which have been trading since the nineteenth century. C.M. Almy, one of the largest in the United States, was founded in 1892. These are established, competent businesses with deep customer relationships.

Product innovation, however, effectively...