Trends come, trends stay — and some die in our warehouse

In 2017 we sold 200 unicorn plasters a month. Eight years later, the last boxes sit in a warehouse corner like time capsules — proof of an era when people stuck horns onto anything that did not run away fast enough.

That is the story we want to tell over the next nine weeks. Not out of nostalgia. But because our warehouse is the most honest trend archive we have: what sits here and no longer sells was mainstream once. What stayed has become a classic. And what we just freshly bought could, in three years, end up exactly where the unicorn lies today.

Trends are not fashion. They are mirrors.

When a visual trend runs for several years, it is not because a designer declares it. It is because it meets a collective mood. The unicorn exploded from 2015 to 2017, when "Squad Goals" and Tumblr pastel aesthetics fed the need for innocent escapism in a pre-Trump world. The sloth became an anti-hustle symbol through Zootopia in 2016 — right as the first burnout debates surfaced in mainstream magazines. The cactus served the plant-mom generation that had no garden but still wanted to take on responsibility. The axolotl arrived in 2021 with the Minecraft Caves & Cliffs update, exactly when the pandemic made us crave tiny, harmless creatures.

Every trend has a cultural trigger, an emotional function and a half-life. Some become classics. Most die.

The life cycle, briefly

A typical trend goes through four phases:

1. Trigger — a film, a meme, an influencer, a game. The unicorn had Starbucks. The sloth had Disney. The axolotl had Mojang.
2. Mainstream — the big brands jump in. At Manor, Coop and Migros the shelves fill up. At ours too.
3. Saturation — every meaning exhausted. Nothing new comes anymore.
4. Death or persistence — either the trend disappears completely (the sloth), or single pieces become deliverable classics (the unicorn ramen bowl, the cactus kitchen sponge).

Three fates from our own warehouse

The sloth is completely dead. Almost everything we bought after 2018 is sold out today. The trend has been ticked off in the collective consciousness.

The cactus has persisted. The peak assortment from 2017 to 2019 is now run-out stock, but a few pieces (sponges, salt and pepper shakers, a rope soap) still sell quietly today. The hype turned into a home classic.

The axolotl is fresh. We have 75 stress balls in stock. This is the youngest wave — at some point it too will tip over, but today it is firmly in the mainstream.

What comes over the next weeks

We do not go through the trends chronologically, but from "alive" to "dead". At the start we look at what is fresh right now — and at the end we open the warehouse doors to the trends being sold off before they vanish entirely.

• 9 June — Axolotl (2021 to today). How Minecraft brought a real animal species into the mainstream.
• 16 June — Dachshund (2023 to today). The sausage-dog renaissance and why Brat Summer changed everything.
• 23 June — Capybara (2022 to today). "OK I Pull Up" and the great wellness animal.
• 30 June — Kawaii and Sanrio (2018 to today). Hello Kitty turns 50, Pusheen sleeps in the archive.
• 7 July — Cactus (2016 to 2020). Urban Jungle and the plant-mom era.
• 14 July — Sloth (2016 to 2019). Zootopia, anti-hustle and why no costume sells anymore.
• 21 July — Flamingo (2016 to 2019). Pool floats, rose gold and the summer when everything was pink.
• 28 July — Unicorn (2015 to 2018). From the Starbucks Frappuccino to the warehouse relic — and why the ramen bowl survived.
• 4 August — What comes in 2026/27? Our bet: which trend tips over next, which one arrives fresh.

Before we start

Every post in this series ends with two boxes: Last Chance with the run-out pieces we still have in stock, and What stayed with the classics we keep sourcing.