I think you may be onto to something, a good model to look at is Sparkfun (sparkfun.com). What you describe is very similar to what they are doing and they have been very successful, and they have a great model for combining brick and mortar with online.
But SparkFun doesn't own and operate any purely retail stores, do they? They package many of their products for retail in e.g. RadioShacks, but that's very different from actually being a chain of retail stores.
