Personally, I disagree that it is stupid.

In most cases, it would be... depending on what you sell you may have very impatient customers that would be happy to go somewhere else as soon as they can't figure something out.

But in this case, it appears there are relatively few products in the categories... going through three things (or whatever) isn't a big deal, and it shows the customer full detail photos right away. I see the appeal from a marketing perspective when you are dealing with items like these. A casual customer seeing a page full of low-res thumbnails may just glance and not be interested in what they see, whereas if they see the full-res picture they may be blown away and decide they want it even if its not what they were looking for.

I think they're on the right track in that particular situation.

Some stores have customers that are looking for a particular thing. This navigation style would suck for them.

Some store have customers that have no bloody idea what you sell and just got there window shopping... and visual is everything in these cases. Or can be, anyway.

- Steven