Comment by fguerraz

A long time ago I worked at a children's toy store and among other things I was responsible for ordering and restocking the bins full of small loose toys that cost under a buck or two.

A weird thing I noticed was that if an item came in an assortment of colors that included yellow, yellow was always the slowest color to sell. Often bins would end up with just yellow inventory after all the other colors had sold. But I discovered that if I removed the yellow samples from the bin entirely that the overall sales for the item would plummet.

I'd often joke that we should open up another store that only sold yellow merchandise as a way to move the excess inventory that built up from me implementing a yellow-buffering system, but instead we'd just end up donating them to a school or giving them away on Easter or whatever.

In fact, there is demand for colorful products. However, the way businesses measure demand today is through the aggregate unit demand. In effect, you get the lowest common denominator products rising to the top, and people with specific preferences can't get at their desired products. If instead, businesses would measure demand at a more granular level, they'd see this and be able to better serve their customers.

my startup varietyiq is working towards helping apparel businesses do this / have seen it work very well.

I think it goes one layer further, everyone is worried that everyone else is worried that colors don't sell. "I like this used bright pink Honda, but I'm worried no one else will buy it if I want to sell so I'm not going to buy it"

Like it's a perceptual disease where there's a difference between real preferences and perceived preferences and people are making decisions based on their wrong assumptions about everyone else, and when everyone is doing it it becomes true even though we're collectively all making less optimal choices.

Yup. I think it’s terrible the author brought up adolf loos, an architect from the early 1900s, showed a building I don’t think he made, and then blamed him for dull modern apartment buildings. If you look up his buildings, they’re actually pretty cool and weird; he was an artist responding to his time. Modern apartment buildings are developed by people with inordinate wealth who don’t care about the asthetic beauty surrounding those peons who pay them rent. The priority is beauty that impresses on the first viewing to trick renters. Every other incentive is to save money, and art is one of the first things to go when people start trying to be perfectly efficient. That’s the same sort of issue with music, desperation that precludes a focus on pure art.

base neutral colors sell well, exotic colors sell in small amounts => they die out due to small scale/being niche

I think this is really the reason. Companies also save money by not making things in a variety of colors.