Entrepreneurship is a a response to something new and unexpected – an idea, a technological innovation, a lucky accident, an emergent demand. It is by nature difficult to predict, sometimes responding to a niche customer group forgotten by others. Such is the case with FLDSDress.com, the new apparel website started by women of the YFZ (“Yearning for Zion Ranch”), the community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus that made headlines this Spring for reasons completely unrelated to entrepreneurship.

To give some background, earlier this year Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) in April removed all children from the compound, arguing that minors were at risk of sexual abuse. CPS dispersed many of the children in foster families throughout Texas, separating them from their parents. Mothers, worried that CPS would not be able to furnish modest, FLDS-style clothing for the children, made their own clothing and set up an online store for CPS to use. The children are now out of state custody, but many of the women who followed their children to their new temporary homes have not yet returned to the YFZ Ranch, and they need to pay for rent and food. The store, then, presently serves the more practical purpose of basic sustenance for these uprooted families.

Apparently, the store is tapping into an oft-ignored demographic: (more…)