If you were able to cull all the standard advice in order to design the perfect online microbusiness retail outfit, it would look something like this:

First, find a market niche. Then offer your niche a set of products that are difficult to find, at prices that most will be able to afford (even if those prices might be a tad higher than regular, run-of-the-mill products in that category).

In addition to your product catalog, enhance your easy-to-navigate web site with a large library of encyclopedic information about your niche category. Invite your customers to offer additional information, links and other contributions.

Likewise, invite product feedback and demonstrate that you listen to that feedback through the products you offer and those you remove from your catalog. Be a member of the community around your products, rather than simply a seller of those products.

Get yourself some coverage in media outlets that are important for that community. Encourage word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied customers and publish testimonials on your web site.

If you do all that, you will end up with something very much like Treasured Locks.

Treasured Locks is an online retailer selling “high quality hair and skin care products, predominantly for the needs of African Americans and people of color.” The business is owned and operated by Tywana and Brian Smith out of their home in Westchester, Ohio, not far from Cincinnati.

Treasured Locks is actually a rather amazing operation. Tywana, her husband and four “very part time” workers (whose combined hours, Tywana tells me, amount to 20 per week) produce their three in-house brands, sell 18 brands by 15-20 other manufacturers, and process between 30 and 35 orders per day.

On top of that, the Smiths homeschool their two young daughters. Even before Treasured Locks grew to the point that Brian Smith was able to quit his job and go to work with the company, he worked from home in computer hardware and software sales. Theirs is a truly home, hearth and family-centered lifestyle and the business fit into that lifestyle perfectly.

This wasn’t the original plan when Tywana started the business back in May of 2001, of course. “It was just going to be something I worked on part-time, just for babysitting money and a chance to go out once a month,” she recalls.

And yet, everything seemed to go right for her. She recognized that fewer people of color were confining themselves to ethnic enclaves with stores catering to their needs, which created a remote sales market for her products. Thanks to that rather shrewd insight, she was able to find those “riches in niches” that everybody was talking about three or four years later.

Originally, she invested in some pay-per-click advertising in search of customers. Then fortune smiled on her once again. About three years after she started the firm, she was profiled by Ebony Magazine in a piece about African-American women who work from home.

Exposure in a major media outlet for her target market got her a serious boost in sales and led to a loyal customer base, a sizable email marketing list, and plenty of word-of-mouth referrals. Today, she does no advertising at all.

And she really is a part of the community surrounding the products she sells. Tywana makes no secret of the fact that she tries new products on herself, on her children and on her mixed-race nieces and nephews before she sells them on her site. If that isn’t possible, she seeks out others who have used the product, to get feedback from them.

And she shares a mountain of information with her customers, not only about the products she sells but also about more general matters of skin and hair care for African-Americans, biracial individuals and anyone else with similar special cosmetic needs.

It has all paid off, too. While Tywana did not share her average annual revenues with me, she did tell me that her business brings in a six figure income that allows her family to live quite comfortably.

With such a classic, textbook success story in online retailing, you might think that Brian and Tywana Smith would not have any major business headaches. But, of course, they do. Their problem has to do with the microbusiness way of growth.

On the one hand, Tywana wants to grow her customer base to the point that she could hire enough full time help to free her and her husband from many of the day-to-day tasks that go into running her busy enterprise. She is not sure, she says, what to do to take her business to ‘the next level.’

At the same time, she is hesitant about the idea of getting into large scale manufacturing and distribution of her products through national chains and other retail outlets. “That’s a whole different way of doing business,” she said.

Like most growth-oriented microbusiness owners, Tywana would like to make more money and perhaps set up the business so that it needs less hands-on care and feeding from her and her husband. But she does not necessarily want the business to grow much beyond micro-size and she has no interest in building an empire.

“It would be nice to not have to do all the leg work and still bring home the same amount of money,” she concluded.

The challenge of the mezzanine business owner who wants to grow some but not too much is not unique to Treasured Locks. But it is a challenge that most such business owners have to figure out on their own.

Because so few seem to understand microbusiness growth (as distinct from other sorts of business growth), there is relatively little support for it.