Trends Are Inspiration, Not Mandates
Natural Products Expo West and the American Meat Conference both wrapped last week, which means your inbox looks like mine — buried in trend recaps, hot takes, and someone on your team has already forwarded at least one with a note that says "we should talk about this."
There is no shortage of people telling you what's trending. What's harder to find is a clear way to decide what to actually do about it.
That's what this month is about.
Trends: How to Evaluate Before You Chase
“We just need to get on trend — it is on fire, and if we hurry and execute, we’ll be on top too.”
“But I don’t see how this relates to what we do now. The team is strapped already. We can’t keep chasing every trend.”
If you’ve spent any time building a business, you’ve been on at least one side of this conversation — and probably both. Sometimes in the same week.
The pressure to chase what’s new doesn’t just come from the market. It comes from your board, your broker, your buyer, and your team — often all at once, often with different agendas. Everyone has a trend they think you should be on.
If you pursue everything, your strategy dilutes. If you ignore the trends, you miss real opportunities. And if you keep reacting to everyone else’s priorities, you’ll wake up running a version of your brand that doesn’t look much like the one you set out to build.
The cost of reacting without a filter shows up the same way every time: fired up after a trade show, move fast, six months later, sitting on underperforming inventory and an exhausted team. The trend wasn’t wrong. The decision-making process was.
So before you walk back in and declare “we need to add XYZ to our innovation strategy” — ask yourself these three questions first.
Is it aligned to your current strategy?
“Doesn’t fit our strategy” is code for more time and making less money.
Strategy is about aligned choices — the what, where, how, and who of your product or service. At this stage of growth, where your team is executing without you in every room, misalignment doesn’t stay contained. It multiplies. And by the time you notice it, the damage is done.
Consider this: a brand committed to the Gen X buyer decides to add Gen Z after a wave of category reports. Marketing budget gets split, messaging gets muddled, distribution stays tuned to the wrong shelf. They weren’t wrong about the Gen Z opportunity. They were wrong to think they could pursue it without consequence to everything already in motion.
Does it warrant shifting your strategy?
An attribute is not a strategy.
This is where the most expensive mistakes get made. A snack brand sees gut health everywhere — trade press, buyer conversations, investor decks — and adds a prebiotic claim to their core line. They didn’t ask whether their consumer came to them for gut health, whether the brand had credibility in that space, or whether the cost blew up their margin. The trend was real. The strategy wasn’t. Now they have a reformulated product that confuses their loyal buyer and doesn’t convert a new one. Your strategy is not fiber — it is four choices.
Before you decide a trend warrants a shift, pressure-test it:
Does it create genuine value for your consumer — not just a consumer?
Is it differentiated from what competitors are already doing?
Does it leverage your team’s actual strengths?
Does it connect back to the core value your brand already owns?
The best pivots don’t look like chasing. They use a trend to deepen what was already working.
Is your team built for timely innovation?
Your first step is not to innovate — it is to get your process in line.
The scrappy, nimble brand that gets innovation to market fast is a real competitive advantage — until the company grows and the same lack of process that made you fast makes you fragile. Chaos, burnout, missed launches.
Consider a beverage brand that commits to a four-month launch with no feasibility check and no alignment on cost targets. They hit the shelf — eventually — but the margin is underwater, the claims haven’t cleared legal, and ops isn’t sure they can sustain it at scale. Fast became expensive fast.
A few weeks spent establishing a foundation will save you more than that in execution. Instead of stage gate, I start growth-stage brands with what I call a "baby gate" — three questions, in this order:
Is it desirable?
Is it feasible?
Is it profitable?
Answer them honestly in ideation, again in development, and again before you commercialize. The chances you enter the market successfully are wildly improved.
Process isn’t the enemy of speed. It’s what makes speed sustainable.
Chasing trends can be a legitimate strategy — the intentional fast follower who watches the market, executes quickly, and pivots when the next wave arrives. But it only works when it’s deliberate and resourced.
For the rest of us, trends should be inspiration, not mandates. The brands that sustain growth aren’t the ones who caught every wave. They’re the ones who knew which waves were theirs to ride.
So the next time someone walks back from a trade show and says, “we need to get on this,” stop and ask: does this make us more of what we already are, or less?
Continue Reading