Everyone loves ‘whimsymaxxing,’ including your local craft store

FastCompany: Whimsy can take many forms: a walk home among the flowers, collecting colorful oddities, or, perhaps, bedazzling any surface in sight with shimmering stick-on jewels. By late summer, so-called “whimsymaxxxing” acquired a much more specific meaning. People began affixing huge, colorful gem stickers en masse to their faces , dogs , cars , water bottles , phone cases , and truly any other imaginable surface. Across social media people showed off their bedazzled . . . everything. But to particpate in whimsymaxxing, you need sheets of gem stickers. Lots and lots of stickers.

The bedazzling trend has led stores that sell crafting products to restock and reposition their products to meet the moment. “The search on our internal site for ‘bedazzling kit’ grew by 69,000 searches from May to August—that’s a crazy number,” said Stacey Shively, chief merchandising officer at Michaels. “If you look at the word ‘bedazzle,’ that increased by 18,000.” And it’s not just at Michaels. Target has similarly seen a noticeable increase in demand for gem items, beginning over the summer. For a retailer like Michaels, feeding the hunger for gems is no problem. “We have all the pieces and kit parts,” Shively says.

As soon as certain terms begin making waves, the company’s e-commerce team will create a bundle using the searched words like “bedazzle” or “whimsymaxxxing,” and they’ll similarly recode and tag items on Google. “Once we see terms like that search come up, we act really fast and try and pivot it so that it shows up for the customer in a really nice way,” she says. A trend like this works well for Michaels, because the company doesn’t have to shorten its buying cycle—it already has tons of gem inventory. It just becomes a matter of presenting it in a way that resonates with customers trying to hop onto the microtrend du jour.

But what happens if your inventory isn’t already brimming with gorpcore or tomatocore or whatever else folks are maxxxing on at the moment? Stores need to decide quickly how they’re going to handle these algorithm-fueled trends, which often crest and crash in dizzyingly short periods of time. “Your normal pipeline might be 46 weeks to develop and produce and get it to stores,” says Catriona Van Dyck, associate partner with Columbus Consulting, a retail consulting firm.

Businesses could cut “that down to where you could get product in four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks—that kind of Zara model,” she says, referring to the fast fashion retailer. But even that turnaround time might be too long. “The business has to gauge, how fast could this change? By the time you get it, it may be over,” Van Dyck says.

She advises retailers to stay close to their customers, “whether it’s through studies, whether it’s through customer feedback, whether it’s through observing customers and interacting with them in the stores or online,” because their interest ultimately determines whether it makes sense to be involved with any given trend. “It’s really the relevance of what the trend is and how that relates to your customer,” she says.

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The concept of 'whimsymaxxing' represents a significant trend that brands can leverage, making it impactful, while the approach of using real-time data is somewhat novel but not groundbreaking, and it offers actionable insights for brand strategy professionals.