Behold the beloved food truck, clunking around on impossibly small wheels. There it is, cradling the curb—a beacon of modest enterprise catering to your convenience. In most cases, it promises sloppy tacos as you leave the club or spicy kabobs on the sidewalk outside the office.

The nomadic business model is often both lucrative to seller and advantageous to buyer. The vehicle owner foregoes the lofty overhead of brick-and-mortar space for the expediency of delivering commerce directly to its congregation of customers. Meanwhile, patrons aren’t burdened by laborious tasks such as looking or walking to get what they want. So if food trucks are blowing up the quick-grub game in most metropolitan areas, why shouldn’t other types of roaming retail share that success?

Ask Gechi Robertson, mobile boutique entrepreneur. She decided to start her own clothing business, and just months later she’s behind the wheel of Colorful Life. As in literally behind the wheel of a 20-foot box truck, barreling down the highway at 5:30 a.m. to get to her first gig. She’d been up the entire night scrambling with last minute details.

Vinyl wood flooring for a lustrous, finished look? Check. Track-lighting for warm ambiance? Check. Generator for powering breezy fans and amiable jams? Check. Mobile phone swipey-device for credit card purchases? Check. Plenty of room for shoppers to come on board and browse? Definitely. Curtained-off fitting room? Surprisingly, yes. Clothes and jewelry to sell? You bet.

Customers? We’ll see.

The whole thing came to fruition fast, Gechi says—so quickly that there was almost no time for promoting the business. But who needs marketing when you’ve got a great idea and a community that goes gaga for uncommon finds? It’s her first day, and she’s posted up at an outdoor market in the posh Georgetown neighborhood of Washington D.C. Pedestrians are magnetized to the truck’s simple charm. Some laud its ingenuity and wonder where they’ll see it again. Because this week it’s at the market but next it might be on the other side of town, parked near a commercial area for lunchtime shopping or as an addition to a hosted wine party.

With the itinerant nature of the mobile boutique, Gechi is not just the owner, merchandiser, sales associate, and every other link in the retail clothing chain-of-command. She’s also the driver and the real estate agent. Gechi posits where she’ll park based on the “if you build it, they will come” mantra. And as a unique benefit of business on wheels, if they don’t come, she can simply build it again somewhere else.

While there’s no continuous overhead, some locations are more expensive than others. She has to pay entrance fees at established outdoor markets, but elsewhere, she has a license to sell almost anywhere she wants—including curbside at some locations where she’s only obliged to feed the meter.

The process of obtaining the retail permit was a bit frustrating, she remembers, but understandably easier than it would be for say, a food truck with the liability of ovens and fryers and exhaust units. And well worth it. Because with Colorful Life, Gechi can experiment with fine-tuning her niche through trial and error.

She has the creative reigns to choose the labels and items in her inventory. She can purchase what she wants and from whom she wants. After scouring over tons of designers, she decided to stock up on pieces from independent clothing companies in Los Angeles and New York City. From there, she names items and picks the prices. Currently, some of her items include a sinuous dress labeled Nona, synthetic black leather pants called Shimi, and even a top named after herself.

The storeroom might be confined within the walls of a small truck, but it’s the wheels under that truck that dilate the possibilities for reaching customers, exploring new avenues and locations, and delivering something fresh. Let’s just hope no one’s expecting tacos.