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Its never felt more impossible to keep up with the trend cycle. Trends feel harder to predict, too fast to respond to, and even harder to get in front of. In many instances, it appears to be all reactive rather than proactive. Micro-trends are fleeting and elusive. By the time you read this, the Labubu boom might be over. Dont know what that is? Exactly. Were inundated with trends that are so low-level, so born from “the internet,” that it makes it hard for anyone to zoom out and see the big picture. Theres no time to ask questions like whats driving this change? Whats the human trend behind the micro-trend? However, there are always ways to distinguish the fleeting happenings of the day from insights that actually matter. Doing this successfully does require time and effort. A recent MIT study revealed that the use of ChatGPT is atrophying critical thinking skills. This is a bitter (but likely not shocking) pill, but critical thinking is exactly what we need more of. Sure, tools like ChatGPT can help you move quickly, collating info or top-line snapshots, but they cant replace the time and thinking that you need to unlock relevance. There are core tenets of trend forecasting that can help us with this. They allow us to sort the relevant and useful from the overblown and noisy. But like I said, they require a little effort. Build your bibliography First, breaking free from your self-perpetuating, algorithmic bubble requires significant work. Some platforms may allow you to reset your algorithm, but theres no substitute for building your own bibliography. If you havent already, try to build one that actively takes you away from your typical sources of news and information. Look in places you might not naturally gravitate towards, but show you whats happening outside your sphere. If youre a telehealth brand trying to move from transactional to aspirational, look at whats emerging in high-end hospitality. If youre a fitness brand looking to help your consumers build habits and stay with you, consider reading about the mechanics of the gaming industry. Look outside of your business to get new points of view. Say youre a beauty or a wellness brand right now. Its easy to think clean girl is the key micro-trend influencing the globe, and you should lean in. But if you look around your meeting table and see only slick-haired, twenty-to-thirtysomethings with Rhode lip gloss phone cases, it might just be your surroundings. Businesses have to learn to think forward. Consider the driving factors Once youve uncovered an insight that feels meaningful, its time for some critical evaluation. Speed and convenience are everything right now, so its easy to slip into the just get it done mindset. But when youre trying to speak to deep human truths, you do need to get it right. That means sitting with things and letting them percolate. A classic trends tool is STEEP factors. These help us remember the drivers of trends. They are social, technological, environmental, economic, or political forces that feed into major movements or attitudinal shifts. For example, do you know what a borg (blackout rage gallon) is? A favorite of college students the last several years, theyre gallon jugs filled with alcohol and usually have a fun, borg-centric play on pop culture written on them. The average person looks at this and thinks, Wow, college kids are drinking more than ever. Thats insane. A marketer may look at it and think, Cool, we can sell borg-sized products to young people now. Cultural strategists and trend forecasters might ask, Well, whats in it? If you unpack Gen Zs borgs, theyre made up of alcohol, water, flavor, and electrolytes. Thats because theyre a generation that grew up firmly steeped in wellness culture. You realize borgs arent just about silly names and colorful alcohol, they reflect an attitude of a generation who considers their health differently than those before them. Manifestation versus cultural moment Bear in mind as you uncover new ideas and topics, too, that one example doesnt make a trend. Yes, we can use data from fast-moving content, but we need to assess it thoroughly. Thats when you notice whats beneath the surface of a seemingly quick-churn micro trend. Remember, were looking for cultural signposts. That means different, multi-category, multi-industry spanning examples. I wouldnt call the sustainability movement a trend necessarily, but when it began to explode, we saw its impact everywhere. In fashion, we saw Patagonia encouraging us to buy less. In food, we saw Impossible Foods and Oatly become consumer favorites. Beauty brands began to offer refillable packaging. When you see cross-category adoption, you know something is sticking. Crafting relevance Isn’t this the goal of every business leader? To uncover insights that meaningfully shape your business and its future. Some relentlessly chase relevance, jumping on every viral trend, while others strive for resonance and longevity. You need to strike a balance between the two, but its also important to be intentional in how you pursue the former. To be honest, I struggle to think of an example of a trend thats established itself as truly resonant in recent years. Something impactful doesnt get lost in the endless flood of content. Yet, consumers are increasingly looking for something more enduring. A definition of “insight” is the capacity to gain an accurate and deep, intuitive understanding of a person or thing. If were so overloaded with content, we no longer have that capacity. Those who succeed will be the ones taking the time to uncover the enduring, shaping not just their businesses, but the culture around them.
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E-Commerce
If youve spent any time on the kids birthday party circuit in the past few years, youve likely logged more than one Saturday at a trampoline park amid packs of children freed from the tyranny of indoor voices. Parents of yore in search of movement-focused venues had to settle for Chuck E. Cheese or the ball pit at McDonalds. Today, chains like Sky Zone, Altitude, and Urban Air are competing to earn the loyalties of energetic children everywhere. With a mix of acrobatics, rock climbing, and foam pits, these venues prioritize exercise over technologyand their recent success challenges common assumptions about modern parents tolerance for risk, if only for the length of a childrens party. Or perhaps theyre just thrilled by the absence of smartphones. We hear a lot from our customers about screen time, says Shawn Hassel, CEO of Sky Zone, the trampoline park sectors dominant player. We focus on that analog experience, where kids can just be kids. [Photos: Evan Jenkins] [Photos: Evan Jenkins] Sky Zones 251 locations in North America, almost evenly split between corporate owned and franchises, collectively hosted 300,000 birthday parties in 2024. The company saw $435 million in corporate revenue, $80 million of which Hassel says will go toward expanding to 500 locations by 2027, mostly via franchises. Fueling its growth is a shift to targeting experienced franchisees; the company recently closed a 10-pack deal in the Dallas and Oklahoma City markets with a family that owns several McDonalds locations. On the customer side, Sky Zones membership program, with 800,000 active members, continues to grow, driven byyou guessed itbirthday partiers. Every time, they bring 9 or 12 of their friends, Hassel says. It pretty much sells itself.
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E-Commerce
In recent months in Texas, hempand the state’s $5.5 billion hemp industryhas become a flashpoint in state politics and the wider cultural war. A successful push by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick earlier this year to have the Legislature ban hemp and hemp-derived THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient in hemp and marijuana) was temporarily thwarted by Gov. Greg Abbotts veto of Senate Bill 3 on June 23. But just this week, a special 30-day legislative session was called by the governor, with THC as a top agenda item. A new bill, Senate Bill 5, nearly identical to the vetoed bill, is on the docket for legislators to consider. Texas, by dint of its size and stature among red states, can be seen as a bellwether for how Republican lawmakers are going to handle the hemp and marijuana markets. The state legalized hemp products in 2019, modeling it after the federal Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, which kick-started the contemporary hemp industry and cultivation across the country. But the Texas law concerned itself more with agriculture and regulating the growing of hemp, which led to some oversights in terms of consumer regulation, said Katharine Harris, a drug policy expert at Rice Universitys Baker Institute for Public Policy. Products made with THC derived from hemp became legal, even while THC derived from marijuana plants remained banned. Thats led to rapid growth and a consistent pushincluding from the industry itselffor more regulations. Texas has the potential to be the second-largest cannabis market in the country, said Lukas Gilkey, founder of Hometown Hero CBD, a prominent advocate for the industry who previously launched ongoing legal action against state regulators to prevent them from banning hemp-derived TCH products in 2021. You used to be sent to jail for having a joint, but the numbers for this industry are staggering for an industry that isnt even six years old. A sudden multibillion-dollar industry In the six years the hemp industry has existed in Texas, its been on a speedrun toward becoming a sizable sector of the economy, according to a March 2025 Whitney Economics analysis. The industry now generates $267 million in state tax revenue, employing 53,000 workers who receive $2.1 billion in wages. Hometown Heros revenues expanded five times over during the first six months after the law was passed. Recreational marijuana is not legal to sell in the statealthough Texas does have a small medical marijuana programbut possession of small amounts is starting to be decriminalized in some cities. However, since hemp is legal, the hemp industry in Texas can conduct transactions that pot sellers cannot, such as take credit card payments and engage in interstate commerce. The growth of hemp in the state has garnered quite a constituency of small-business owners, entrepreneurs, and recreational users, as well as a sizable community of military veterans who utilize hemp goods for medicinal purposes. Many farmers have made hemp a main crop and were outraged that the industry was on the verge of closure. Throw the lowlifes in jail if you want to stop the bad actors, Ann Gauger, co-owner of Caprock Family Farms in Lubbock, told The Texas Tribune. But dont take out the American farmers. Dont take out the ag producers. A battle for what Texas means The battle over hemp in Texas can be cast as a battle about the personality of the frontier state itself: a no-nonsense, freedom-loving, self-made sense of pride in building a business with your bare hands versus a well-earned reputation as a right-wing policy incubator with deeply religious leaders. There have been other attempts to regulate and reform hemp laws during other legislative sessions. (Texas has biannual sessions that last six months every other year.) But over the course of the last few years, the industry has grown substantially, to the point where its quite visible, Harris said. That has simply made some of the regulatory issues more obvious. For instance, manufacturing smokable hemp products was outlawed, but the sale of such items wasnt prohibited. The states regulations also lacked more concrete restrictions around potency and age limits, and had few restrictions on where items could be sold: A retail license cost just $155 per location. One of the issues that we have right now is that there are a lot of unsafe products on the market because we don’t have the oversight necessary, Harris said. That’s one of the things that they really need to fix. George Medici, a spokesperson for the Texas Hemp Business Council, said the industry itself has been advocating for new regulationschildproof packaging, age limits, setbacks to keep sales away from schoolsso far, to no avail. Advocates have been busy lobbying in Austin during the special session, and they feel somewhat positive about the future. I think were optimistic; its kind of hard to tell, Medici said. Polling suggests, and always has, that people want these products on the market, and want them regulated. The momentum is positive. What thatll look like making the sausage, I dont know. There are also efforts to push production of more industrial hemp, according to state Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, but thats just getting started. Miller believes that regardless of what happens with the regulation of products with THC, Texas will be a national leader in the hemp industry. The potential for a full ban Its also clear that the clash around hemp will continue. During a press conference about the issue, Lt. Gov. Patrick suggested that hemp producers might be part of a terrorist money-laundering scheme and asked if the state really wanted everybody to get high. Patrick and his allies in the Texas Legislature feel that hemp products have become too common, are too hard to police, and should be banned instead of regulated. Rice Universitys Harris believes the current special session will likely deal with additional regulations around prohibiting access to minors and addressing additional regulations for the industry. She argues that any kind of ban would just push buyers to the illicit market, which would end up being more dangerous. Hometown Hero’s Gilkey believes Senate Bill 5 will pass in the Senate but says that even if it does end up getting signed by the governor in the special session, he has a team of lawyers ready to sue them into oblivion. In the long term, the Texas hemp industry will have to adapt to a changing landscape and likly face a little more regulation, akin to whats already seen in many of the legal marijuana states, Harris said. Shed like to see an effort toward self-regulation and legislation that encourages better behavior within the industry, as far as guaranteeing the safety profiles of their products (as do many in the industry). The problem is that theres an industry and a market for these products that exists, so it becomes a lot harder to make it all go away, she said.
Category:
E-Commerce
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