What can reasonably be expected for annual earnings from a niche e-commerce business? entrepreneur how earn by blogging blog

I recently left my job and am considering building out an e-commerce business for tulip knick-knacks (accessories for people who love tulips - e.g., calendars, t-shirts, keychains, etc.). However, I'm not sure how much opportunity exists here, and am looking for some insight. In particular - could this be a lucrative enough business to push on full-time and pass on other things out there?

The quick context is that my family has a tulip bulb business, and as part of that they launched a small 'tulip museum' in Amsterdam. The museum store sees pretty good sales (I believe ~$1M per year in revenues), and at least some of my family believes that there is unmet demand online.

I've been asked about building out an e-commerce business to sell basically the same stuff that exists in the museum store - tulip knick-knacks. However, due to a lot of concerns around focus and pulling away from the primary business, this would not be done as me 'joining the company' and launching the online sales, but instead by creating a new venture (EIN, etc.) and doing everything independently (although I will be able to leverage the SKU list, etc. of the museum store). The expectation is that I would be diving in full-time, and would be responsible for leading this through and owning it in perpetuity (at least owning a portion of it - the existing business would provide some startup capital and have majority equity as a result).

I'm trying to determine whether this could actually be a viable, stand-alone business (versus a 'side project'), and am a bit wary. In particular, I've done some research and found that museum stores tend to do only ~10% of total sales online, so extrapolating that would mean ~$100K total revenues (not enough to live off of after all costs). I would basically need to build out a true e-commerce site for tulip lovers, which to me sounds like it requires a better site than I could build with Shopify, and probably a lot of marketing. Further, apart from the starting capital I would have to do it with minimal support from the existing business arms (e.g., no cross-selling to the main tulip business customers in the near-term). I also don't know how 'unique' the products would be - people can buy Tulip calendars on Amazon, so there would have to be a reason they are attracted to the page I develop and would prefer to buy from there.

Has anybody built out a niche e-commerce business like this before (one where its focused on a very specific type of customer, and selling products that can likely be found elsewhere - almost more of a curation than anything else)? Would getting to an annual sales rate of e.g., $1M be an unreasonable goal? If not, how long would it likely take to build up to that if I'm being generally smart about things?

Thanks - if I say no to this I need to be pretty delicate and clear in my reasons so any input or advice is very appreciated :)

submitted by /u/ccomm1
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