My Daily Emails

A reader asked a smart question about whether seasonality still matters for products built around gifts or specific times of year. Shara from Austin wrote after my post Selling No Longer

Some physical products (and their customers) benefit from never feeling fully “sold.” I’ve worked with a company that sells a wellness hardware product with a subscription model … and the

Buyers aren’t idiots, and they know it. An appliance retailer near me ran ads reminding consumers that the expected life of a dishwasher is five years. A salesperson in a

Demand is now reacting in hours … not months. New retail data out of 2025 shows something uncomfortable for planners. Buying behavior has become a lot less seasonal and way

Going public has warped how we talk about growth. And that’s a problem. When brands like Peloton hit a ceiling, shareholders get pissed. The assumption is that growth should ALWAYS

Most new offerings don’t fail because they’re bad, but because they’re nowhere near good enough. In I Need That, I talk about the 10X Revelation: the jarring truth that an innovative product

Some part shortages fly under the radar. This one doesn’t. Over the last year or so, computer memory stopped behaving like a boring tech commodity. Prices spiked and lead times

Yesterday Amazon confirmed what buyers have been showing us for years: screens didn’t replace stores, but exposed what stores still do best. For a decade, “digital-first” was treated like destiny.

This is the flip side of the volatility I wrote about the other day. In that note, I talked about how retail demand no longer moves in seasons. It moves

This year’s show wasn’t focused on better screens or smarter apps. It was more about machines doing real work in human spaces. CES 2026 made something unmistakable: AI is stepping