Predicting E-Commerce Trends with Next Big Shop

This week on DTC Pod, we’re joined by the founders of Next Big Shop, David Hoffman and Samir Rayani.

David and Samir come from a background of creating data products and now apply their skills to track and interpret retail and online sales trends. Their focus is on offering strategic insights to direct-to-consumer brands.

At Next Big Shop, their focus is on guiding DTC strategies by collating publicly available but hard-to-access commerce data for insights into brand success and product trends.

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Fav Quotes from Episode #329

“We're tracking 84 million SKUs and seeing how any of those SKUs are performing. But we zoomed out and did this analysis for Black Friday, and it's really interesting to see the long arc of COVID trends where there was this movement towards being at home and buying lots of home goods and making your space great and wearing loose-fitting, comfy clothes, and then seeing just the surge around Black Friday, of the opposite behavior emerging around it, becoming very individual focused. Hey, I'm going back out in the world. Skincare products are crushing. Supplements are crushing.”

— David Hoffman, 00:09:59 to 00:10:37

“I met a brand that blew up online, just D2C, got into retail and now is basically contemplating turning their homepage into a store locator only because it’s just more efficient for them to sell through the retailers than it is to, you know, fulfilled on their own.”

— Samir Rayani, 00:47:29 to 00:47:47

3 Best DTC Practices from David & Samir

1. Use Data to Confirm or Challenge Your Assumptions

Whether you're adjusting your marketing strategy or considering the expansion of your product line, data possesses the decisive power to align your decisions with what's actually transpiring in the market.

2. Understand that Success is a Moving Target

To remain successful, brands must consistently monitor and analyze the right data, adjust their operations and marketing efforts in response to those insights, and always be ready to pivot strategies as new information becomes available.

3. Spur Growth with Predictive Analytics

Data can inform everything in your business, from product development, resource allocation, pricing, and inventory to lifecycle. You just need to learn how to look for patterns in data and effectively exploit them.