4 Breakout Product Trends! 🚀

A Way To Style Your Crocs, A Product To Stay Alert on the Field, The New Way of Making Shirts, and A Water Bottle With Tech!

Hey Trend Watchers! — Nick here.

I hope you had a great New Year’s Eve and are ready to start 2023 with some juicy insights into trending products and business!

Are you subscribed? If not, you could miss 2023’s next big thing!

Now let’s get into it ↓

📈 Products on the Rise

Product #1 - Croc Charms (+9,900%)

Croc Bling! Google searches are EXPLODING for small charms that are added to your croc shoes.

Croc charms are small decorative items that are designed to be added to a pair of Crocs shoes.

I know what you’re thinking, “They’re just small pieces of plastic, how much revenue could they really generate?”

A lot.

At the end of 2021 (before the charm craze continued its take off), company Jibbitz reported that they sold 22M Croc Charms, totaling $112M in sales!

Etsy sellers are also making a killing selling these charms.

This seller sold over 30k Croc Charms in less than 12 months.

Product #2 - Smelling Salts (+171%)

Wake up and smell the... salts? Smelling salts have experienced a resurgence in popularity due to their ability to provide a quick and powerful pick-me-up.

Smelling salts are a chemical stimulant that produces a strong, pungent smell when crushed or broken open.

They are often used to revive people who have fainted.

However, it has been used by athletes and bodybuilders to increase alertness and energy before a sporting game or workout.

But how do they work?

The strong, pungent ammonia odor of smelling salts is thought to stimulate the brain and increase blood flow, leading to an increase in heart rate and blood pressure.

Who’s Doing It?

• Ammoniasport - This Amazon seller is conservatively generating over $100k/mo with their smelling salt products.

• Safetec - A clinical distributor that offers ammonia inhalent towelettes. Not marketed for recreational purposes but rather for fainting alleviation.

📰 Industry Shift

DTF Printers (+8,200%)

Printing Profits. These innovative machines are taking the textile industry by storm, allowing users to skip traditional printing processes and adhere designs directly onto fabric.

DTF (Direct to Fabric) printers use special inks and printheads to print designs directly onto a transparent sheet that is then applied to fabric, resulting in high-quality, long-lasting prints.

They're particularly popular with small businesses, as they offer a cost-effective and efficient way to produce custom-designed products like shirts.

If you’ve felt like you have heard of something similar, it’s because you have.

DTG (Direct to Garment) printers became popular during COVID, they work by printing directly onto a garment, however, they are wickedly expensive (~$5-20k) and massive in size.

DTF printers on the other hand, are much smaller, cost less to purchase ($2-4k), cost less to operate, and can print on a broader range of materials.

This is why the interest in these bad boys is going through the roof!

Check out the shift in demand from DTG Printers to DTF Printers

Who is making money with these? I’ll tell you!

• Google searches for “DTF Transfers” are soaring! People are searching for a place where they can send in a design, and receive it printed onto the DTF transfer ready to adhere to a shirt or other material.

• Etsy sellers are buying DTF printers and using the POD (Print on Demand) method to create listings of garments with designs edited onto them, and only when someone purchases the item, that's when they will produce it.

• Innovators in clothing. Check out this video that shows how manufacturers are using embroidery machines in combination with DTF/DTG printing to produce beautiful artwork-like graphics.

Who’s Doing It?

• Punehod - This Amazon seller is acting as a middleman for the manufacturer Procolored. Across all of their Amazon listings, they are generating an estimated $300k+/mo selling a range of DTF printers.

• Prestige - This high-end DTF printer manufacturer produces the best-in-the-biz machines. The machine sells for upwards of $4k but you can guarantee quality, even with the technology being so new.

🚨 Business Radar

Cirkul (+4,850%)

Flavored Fortune! This company is shaking up the hydration game. These innovative water bottles allow users to customize their hydration experience by adding flavor pods to their water.

These bottles feature a unique system that allows users to easily switch up the taste of their water without adding any artificial sweeteners or calories.

Just load in the pod and crank the knob to whichever intensity of flavor you want.

With all the hype surrounding the brand, I decided to go out and pick up a Cirkul water bottle myself to try it out.

Here are the pros:

• The system is easy, you really do just drop the flavor pod in and start sipping.

• The flavors are good! Not too artificial tasting.

• The bottle is large and holds more water than a standard one-time-use plastic water bottle.

Now the cons:

• The flavoring runs out, fast! I drink a lot of water, so when I saw on the packaging that the pods will last 7-8 refills, I was sold. But that was far from the truth. I got roughly 4 refills before it was gone. This is a big problem for the company.

• Pricey. With so many flavored waters on the market, I’ve tried them all. Cirkul is up there with the most expensive. The bottle itself sells for $18 on the website and each refill pod costs ~$3-4.

The company has proven the concept that making water enjoyable to drink works, but the affordability and false claims may end up costing the brand in the long term.

❓ Can I Ask You Something?

As I plan out my 2023 goals, I want to hear from you!

What do you want to see in this upcoming year?

Would you like me to continue hand-picking the most interesting trends and creating detailed reports?

OR

Would you like me to build out a database where you can sift through the trends yourself?

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Thank you for all the support! I truly enjoy providing as much value as possible and am excited to see what this next year holds!

And with that, I bid you farewell!

Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!

Happy New Year,

Nick 👋