u/geos-takes

It's my job to spot product trends and the thing I keep coming back to is that most of the time, the biggest trends aren't even new products, they're just old products that someone figured out how to make you care about.

F1 cars have always been fast but Drive to Survive just made you care about the actual people inside them and suddenly millions of people who had never watched a single race in their life were buying merch and booking tickets to grands prix - insane when you think about it.

Creatine has been in gyms since the 90s and someone just reframed it as a focus supplement for women and now its in every single morning routine video. Cold plunging is just cold water but sell the tub and the thermometer and the 5am personality that comes with it and suddenly its a $5k identity purchase. Walking is free and always has been but call it zone 2 cardio and add a weighted vest and a Peter Attia reference and now its a longevity protocol apparently.

The actual product is rarely what's doing the heavy lifting, its the version of yourself you get to be when you own it e.g an oil sprayer isn't just an oil sprayer its a prop in the 'i meal prep on sundays and have my life together' personality, a mushroom supplement isn't really a supplement its 'i do my own research and i don't just take whatever i'm told'

Most brands think finding a good product is the hard part but its not, the hard part is making someone feel like it was made specifically for them.

Has anyone pulled this off with their own brand? Keen to hear some more thoughts on this

There's so much talk about finding a winning product or solving a problem nobody has solved yet. I keep seeing products succeed not because they're new but because someone put them in a different context and aimed them at a different person

I'm a product curator at Thieve and honestly only about 10% of my job is tracking down so called "winning products". The rest of the time I've got a checklist: problem, solution, potential for a new angle, will this fit an ongoing or upcoming trend

That angle question is the one I keep coming back to

Projectors are a good example. Traditionally you think movie night, home cinema, etc but then booktok discovered them and now people are projecting mountain scenes onto their walls while reading books set in the mountains. The product didn't change. The scene did - and a whole new audience showed up for it that the original marketing might have never reached.

Colour changing lamps are another one. The obvious angle is bedroom aesthetics, cool lighting, Gen Z vibes but some stores shifted the scene to the bathroom - relaxing bath, candles, mood lighting = completely different emotion, completely different customer, same product

Mini vacuum cleaners = household cleaning. but you've got desk setup people and car people. Multiple opportunities for different angles. I'm a toddler mum so show me an ad for a mini vacuum designed for cleaning snack crumbs out of car seats.

Same product. Different scene. Different feeling. Different buyer

I think the opportunity is less often "find something nobody is selling" and more often "find an audience this product was never introduced to." the product already exists, the demand already exists, they just haven't met yet

okay so I spend my days looking at trend data at Thieve and here's a little insight i've been mulling over:

People aren't just searching 'dog bed' anymore. They're searching 'orthopedic dog bed.' Not 'microphone' but 'cardioid microphone.' Not 'wallet' but 'wallet with rfid blocking' (all trending rn btw) These aren't niche professional terms anymore. Regular people are searching them.

When that happens it means a category has levelled up. These aren't people randomly scrolling and impulse buying. They've done their research, they know exactly what they want and they're ready to spend money on it. That's a completely different buyer to someone browsing for a generic product.

Most dropshippers are still targeting the broad term and trying to compete on price. But that specific search buyer? They're not looking for cheap. They're looking for the right thing.

We're all experts now apparently. nobody is born knowing what "cardioid" means. They learned it. Reddit threads, youtube reviews, tiktok rabbit holes. By the time they search that term they've already decided what they want, they just need to find the right place to buy it.

If you're in any of these niches, pay attention to how the language is shifting. Your buyers are telling you exactly what they want right down to the word.

I’m a product curator at Thieve and came across the Noka Home store - 10 months old, $63K yearly revenue, clean TikTok content, strong branding, cohesive products.

It doesn't feel like a dropshipping store. It feels like someone had a really clear aesthetic, noticed there was an audience for it, and built everything around that. The products, the content, the website. It all works for their audience.

I see a lot of stores in my job. Most are chasing products. This one built a brand. There's a difference and I think it shows in the numbers for a store that's not even a year old.

fyi I work at Thieve . co and I spend a lot of time tracking and analysing ecom stores with our store search tool so being transparent about that

Everyone talks about building something that runs itself. I think I found one but I'm not sure if it's intentional or a sign something's wrong....

DormVibes. bedroom and dorm decor, $65k/month, 7 years old. no ads that I can see, socials quiet for almost a year, no new products added in 33 weeks. and yet the store is really well built. They tapped into Gen Z bedroom aesthetics before it was everywhere and built a whole catalogue around it. mood lights, blacklight tapestries, bed linen, mushroom lamps. Basically everything you need to make your room look like your Pinterest mood board. The niche is bedroom aesthetics for Gen Z, broad enough that whatever micro trend comes next, cottagecore, dark academia, whatever, they've already got something for it.

But then why haven't they added anything new recently? maybe they just built something solid enough that it doesn't need feeding anymore (SEO, word of mouth, repeat customers, etc)

or maybe it's slowly dying and nobody's home?

Wdyt? Also curious whether anyone here has actually managed to step back from a store and have it keep running and what made that possible?