Give the customers what they want.

I saw this great quote from the MIPCOM media conference: "When consumers tell you what they want, give it to them. Figure out a way to give it to them, because they will figure out a way to get it."

My family's full of ingenious people; we're constantly searching for things that are hard to find, and if we don't find them we make them ourselves, so somebody lost a sale.

• I started sewing again because there was so little variety in clothes being offered for sale in stores. And - what is this stupidity of "color trends"? Each year everybody is supposed to buy all new clothes so they can wear the same color?
  
  One year I poked my head inside a clothing store and there were racks and racks of clothes all made of denim - another year, chartreuse! If I buy, it's at used clothes stores where the "colors of the year" of many different years are all presented at one time.
  
  
• How about a lonnggg swivel arm for a big flatscreen tv? Had to make one. A movable shallow tv stand for a flatscreen tv? Had to make one.
  
  
• Nicely fitting halter for a donkey? Had to take an old horse halter apart and stitch it back up.
  
  
• Now let's talk about Netflix and all the movies and tv shows it does NOT have for its streaming customers. Somebody I know will do illegal downloads for me of shows which are not available to me legally. Who (besides me) benefits from this?
  
  
• Furniture for people whose homes are not gigantic! Most furniture stores are presenting merchandise for supposed customers who live in a very different world than we do! Those giant fat sofas would take up all the floor space! So we don't buy them. The coffee tables are similarly gigantic - so instead of buying one, I got a friend to help me weld a smaller frame together.
  
  
• Why can't you buy a solar chicken coop fan? My son and a friend cobbled one together. Sale lost!
  
  
• Why can't you buy windows with big panes? That was my only requirement when I was looking for windows for the house we were about to build, but they couldn't be found so I built 33 windows myself in the carport.

What have you searched for and not been able to find? What did you do instead?