There is a restaurant in Taipei where the chair you sit on is a toilet, the table is a glass sheet laid over a sink, the lamps overhead are shaped like coils of faeces, and your chicken curry arrives in a miniature commode. Your drink comes in a urinal you are welcome to take home. It is called Modern Toilet, and for about a decade it was one of the most talked-about eateries in Asia.
I keep coming back to it because it answers a question I get asked constantly by friends starting businesses, by classmates finishing tourism projects, and honestly by myself at two in the morning: what actually sells these days? Not what sold in 2015. Not what a marketing textbook says sells. What moves money right now, in a market where everyone is broke, distracted, and scrolling.
Modern Toilet gives you both halves of the answer. The half that made it famous, and the half that nearly finished it.
A banker, a cartoon, and a swirl of chocolate ice cream
The story starts in 2004 in Kaohsiung. A former banker named Wang Zi-wei took inspiration from Dr. Slump, a Japanese manga featuring a character who cheerfully played with poop, and started selling swirled chocolate ice cream served on paper squat toilets. It sold. So he scaled the joke into a full restaurant: toilet seating, bathroom tiling, showerheads on the walls, plungers dangling from the ceiling.
It worked spectacularly. At its peak the chain ran 19 locations across Taiwan, plus branches in Hong Kong and mainland China. CNN put it on lists of the world's strangest restaurants. Backpackers built entire Taipei itineraries around it. Nobody went because the curry was extraordinary. They went because of what happened after the curry — the photo, the caption, the disgusted delight of the group chat back home.
That is the first lesson, and it is not a small one.
The market moved from things to moments, and it is not moving back
What Modern Toilet stumbled onto in 2004 became the defining consumer shift of the next two decades. People stopped buying stuff and started buying stories about themselves.
The numbers back it hard. The global experience economy is now valued at over a trillion dollars, projected to reach roughly $1.2 trillion by 2030. McKinsey's consumer research found that between 2023 and 2025 the global experiences market grew about 2.6 percent while non-essential goods crawled along at 0.8 percent. Across Europe, spending on things like travel and eating out climbed to 22 percent of consumer budgets in 2023, up from 19 percent in 2019, while spending on physical goods stayed roughly flat.
Read that again, because it is the whole game. Under inflation, under economic anxiety, under a cost-of-living squeeze that has everybody clutching their wallets — people cut the shirt and kept the trip. They stopped buying the thing and kept buying the feeling.
So when someone asks me what sells these days, the honest first answer is: experiences sell, and things that behave like experiences sell. A product that generates a moment outperforms a better product that generates nothing.
What Modern Toilet was really selling
Strip away the theme and look at the transaction. A customer paid roughly NT$290 to NT$350 for a themed meal and walked out with three things: an average lunch, a plastic urinal souvenir, and a story they could tell for years.
The food was the cheapest part of that bundle to produce and the least important to the customer. The story was the product. The plate was just the delivery mechanism.
And notice how efficient the story was. You can explain Modern Toilet in one sentence to a stranger and they will immediately react. That is not an accident of the theme, it is the mechanical property that made it spread. Marketing budgets are, in large part, money you spend because your product cannot explain itself. Modern Toilet never had that problem. Every diner walked out as a free distribution channel.
If your business needs three paragraphs and a slide deck before anyone understands why it is interesting, you have not built a product. You have built a homework assignment.
Now the uncomfortable half
Here is the part everybody skips when they cite Modern Toilet as a marketing triumph. Today there are two branches left, both in Taipei — Ximending and Shilin Night Market. Nineteen became two. Branch after branch closed as the hype cooled, and the pandemic finished the job; the flagship Ximending location sat shut for over three years.
Why? Read the reviews honestly and the same verdict keeps surfacing: the concept is brilliant, the service is friendly, and the food is average for the price. You are paying for the experience, and everyone knows it.
That is a survivable weakness for one visit. It is fatal for the second. Novelty is a loan, not income. It buys you attention up front and then quietly demands repayment in the form of something worth returning for. Modern Toilet borrowed enormously — 19 branches worth — against a joke that could only land once per customer.
So here is the harder version of the answer. Novelty sells the first sale. Craft sells every sale after that. Businesses that only master the first become a phase. Businesses that only master the second stay invisible. You need both, in that order, and most people who ask me what sells are really asking how to skip the second one.
Five things that actually sell in 2026
Pulling it together, here is what I think holds up across restaurants, tour operators, software products, and the hustle your cousin is running out of a WhatsApp status.
1. A story the customer can retell in one sentence
Not a tagline you wrote. A sentence they would say. "It's a restaurant where you eat out of a toilet" is a customer sentence. "Delivering innovative, customer-centric dining solutions" is a sentence nobody has ever said out loud to a friend.
2. A moment worth capturing
Design one deliberate moment your customer will photograph, screenshot, or describe. The arrival of the dish. The unboxing. The first screen after signup. This is not vanity; it is the cheapest distribution you will ever buy.
3. A core that survives the gimmick being removed
Ask the brutal question: if I stripped the theme, the packaging, the launch buzz, would anyone still pay? If the answer is no, you do not have a business, you have a campaign. Modern Toilet's answer was "not quite," and the branch count tells the rest.
4. A reason to come back that is different from the reason they came
The first visit is curiosity. The second is quality, convenience, belonging, or price. Something has to change hands on that second visit or your funnel is a bucket with the bottom cut out.
5. Fair value at a price people can defend to themselves
Consumers in 2026 are simultaneously careful and generous — they will cut everyday spending and still pay premium for a memory. But they punish anything that feels like it is charging experience prices for a non-experience. Charge for the moment, and then actually deliver the moment.
What this looks like from Cape Coast
I study tourism in a city that is, in the truest sense, an experience destination. Cape Coast and Elmina do not sell rooms and rice. They sell an encounter with history that people carry for the rest of their lives — the walk through the castle, the door, the silence afterwards. The demand is real and it is exactly aligned with where global spending is going.
Which makes our gaps more frustrating, not less. Too often the story is world-class and the delivery around it is not: interpretation that varies wildly by guide, signage that has seen better decades, facilities that undercut the emotional weight of the site, and almost no thought given to what a visitor takes away, tells others, or comes back for. We have the irreplaceable part — the thing no competitor can copy — and we under-invest in the ordinary parts that turn one visit into a recommendation.
The same applies to the smaller ventures around me. The campus food seller with a genuinely unique dish and no name for it. The tour outfit with a brilliant route and no photograph anyone wants to post. The app founder — and I include myself here — who builds something clever and then explains it in a paragraph that puts people to sleep. In every case the missing piece is not effort. It is the deliberate design of the moment, and then the discipline to make the underlying thing good enough that the moment does not have to carry it alone.
The test I would run before launching anything
Three questions. They take ten minutes and they are ruthless.
- Can a stranger describe what I do, accurately, in one sentence, after thirty seconds? If not, fix the concept before you fix the marketing.
- What is the one moment I have designed for them to talk about? If you cannot name it, it does not exist, and you will be paying for ads forever.
- If the novelty vanished tomorrow, what would keep them paying? Write that answer down. That is your actual business. Everything else is the trailer.
Modern Toilet passed the first two brilliantly and the third only partially. It is still open, still funny, still worth visiting if you find yourself in Taipei — I would go in a heartbeat. But it went from nineteen to two, and that arc is worth more to a founder than a hundred motivational threads about hustle.
What actually sells these days is a moment people want to be part of, wrapped around something that is genuinely good underneath. Get the moment right and they will show up. Get the substance right and they will stay. Get only one and you will spend years wondering why the numbers looked so promising at the start.
If this sparked something for the thing you are building, I would love to hear which of the three questions your idea fails. That is usually where the real work is hiding. More essays on business, education, tourism and technology are at The Pwavwe Papers.
insightful
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