The hyper-specialist shops of Berlin

Another specialist Berlin shop to the list (modelmaking/art materials and tools) and very famous amoung architects:

https://www.modulor.de/en/store-berlin/

I live in Paris and you can find highly specialized shops too. Some shops only sell about three types of fabric, some others will sell only buttons, a certain type of leather or a special type of ink. I love getting in those shops and meeting the people who are really passionate about their visibly small yet huge niche. It always get wonderful once you start looking at the details.

For many many years there was a shop on Victoria street in Edinburgh that appeared to sell nothing but brooms and large balls of string - it was even mentioned in Complicity by Iain Banks.

Here are some pics of it:

http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_MY_P_S/0_my_photographs_shops_...

Edit: Sad to say that I passed that shop for many years going to uni in the Grassmarket (both as a student and working there) and never went in!

Yeah, the communists have destroyed this in the eastern part of Europe nearly perfectly

EDIT: Why am I getting downvoted for a factual, accepted, well researched and well known statement?

Several hyper-specialist shops I know in Munich:

- balloon shops seem to do really well because we have several here and every major city seems to have one

- foam shop for when you need to fix your upholstery

- venetian blind store which only sells the vertical kind

- Ketten Wild was a chain shop that only sold chains but chains in all forms and sizes

- la porcelaine blanche's slogan is "only china, only white" and that is what they do

- elk shop for everything elk related - not that we have any elks in Germany but elks are cute

- Schrauben Preisinger sells only screws. They claim they have 30000 different types in their store and this is absolutely credible. A few years ago I was there to get some M1 screws for a project when I witnessed an interesting exchange between another customer and a salesman. The customer had brought a screw with a quite wide thread. It was a straight screw, not tapered and not a wood screw, just with an obviously non-metric thread. He inquired if they had this type of screw in stock. The salesman answered slightly offended that this was a shop for machine screws and they would not sell furniture screws.

Also button shops are super useful. If you lose a button you go there with your piece of clothing and they will find a suitable replacement in no time. I never visited the one in Berlin but the one in Munich saved me good money.

EDIT: I just remembered two more:

- Gummi bear shops are a bit like balloon shops. I don't understand it but there seems to be enough demand to support several of them in a single city.

- Berlin's Ampelmann. Maybe doesn't quite fit into the category because it's more of a tourist curiosity. On the other hand: A shop that only sells stuff related to the graphic design of a symbol on the traffic lights of a defunct state is quite hyper-specialized I guess.