If you follow fashion statistics, you might predict the occasional trend — suede fabric is expected to grow 17% among women between July and September, for example. But for the most part, trends are cultural moments you simply have to choose to hop on and off as a brand. Timing is everything, and capitalizing on trends means being on your toes and ready to pivot.

Let’s look at how you can begin to spot the inevitable trends, stay agile to capitalize on surprise trends that crop up, and position your ecommerce shop for what’s sizzling by summer.

Learn Where to Spot the Summer Trends

Sometimes, spotting trends is all about paying attention in the right places. For example, a surge of motorized floaties on TikTok piqued interest in the same products during the summer of 2024. If you’d been tracking influencer content on TikTok and Instagram reels for trends, you might have spotted that one coming.

But scrolling TikTok isn’t always enough. You can get more strategic about where you can position yourself for spotting summer trends:

  • Social media is a good bet. Create a unique account for your store and let the algorithm do some of the work. Follow relevant influencers within the niches you want to explore. Engage with TikTok and Instagram reels that highlight upcoming product trends. Make a routine from TikTok’s Discover tab and Instagram’s Explore page. If that’s not enough, try hashtag research tools like Hashtagify to find hashtag suggestions for your posts that can help you spot trends.
  • Search data. Google Trends is your top tool for spotting repeating seasonal patterns. If you spot a trend that feels like it’s about to peak, give it a quick search in Google Trends. Notice any repeated spikes around the same time of the year? If so, plot out the current date to give yourself a “napkin math” estimation of how long you can anticipate the trend to last.
  • Tune in to industry insights. Watch for trending categories and plot them with the summer trends you can expect to thrive. Eco-friendly outdoor gear? Athleisure? Niche products like picnic kits? Sign up for industry-relevant marketing newsletters, and don’t just read the content. In particular, watch the ads and sponsors of these newsletters. A seasonal shift in sponsors might subtly announce an upcoming trend.

Curate a Seasonal Product Line

Once you’ve gotten good at spotting trends, it’s time to position your products accordingly:

  • Get more flexible with what you offer. Maybe you can’t immediately manufacture a product to cultivate popularity in the latest trend. But you can partner with local artisans or even dropshippers to create more flexibility in your store.
  • Bundle trendy items with existing inventory. You don’t have to reposition your entire store for a summer trend that might be gone by September. Seasonal bundles can help you capture a trend without changing everything you sell.
  • Stick to strategies that smaller vendors can use. Smaller vendors will have limited production capacity and strict lead times, so don’t overwhelm them. Create email offers to estimate pre-orders, for example. Or create an offering built-in scarcity, such as limited-time product offerings, to capitalize on these trends.

Maximize Your Visual Appeal

Once you’ve spotted a trend, you’ll want to position your products appropriately — sometimes leveraging visuals with new photographs. For instance, have you invested in summer-ready, lifestyle-focused product photography? Or are most of your products sitting on a stage with a clean, formless background?

Summer has a distinct look: sun, sand, blue skies, and green grass. Bright colors tend to capture attention online more than muted autumn colors, which should work to your advantage. Consider staging photos of your summer product bundles to capture the hottest trends you researched above.

Marketing the Trends with New Campaigns

In our post about social media shopping trends, we noted that social media’s use of curated content, scarcity, and limited-time offers can induce fear of missing out (FOMO), prompting impulse purchases. According to TrustPulse, 60% of people make purchases because of FOMO, most occurring within 24 hours of the experience.

That’s especially true for summer trends. Customers know these summer trends aren’t going to last forever. September will be just around the corner, the bundles will be gone, and the trend will have lost its staying power. To capture the buzz and excitement — and maybe induce a little FOMO — consider creating limited-time offers or limited-supply offers. To get these promotions in front of your eyes, you might consider collaborating with micro-influencers to amplify your reach, too.

Avoid the Common Pitfalls of Chasing Trends

Surfing the wave of a summer trend can be a great way to move inventory and capture more 

attention — but there are some risks of falling off the board. To avoid these pitfalls, make sure you adopt some strategies: 

  • Brand alignment. Is the summer trend something that fits with what you already offer? If not, customers might wonder why you’re chasing a trend that has nothing to do with what you typically offer, which can reduce brand trust.
  • Inventory forecasting. Are you ready for a big wave? If not, you might want to do some inventory forecasting based on earlier sales to ensure you’re ready to scale if the trend really catches fire.
  • Watching what works. Every trend is an opportunity to learn something about your customers. Conduct social media polls, cull together product reviews, and run customer surveys to see why a trend did or didn’t resonate with your audience.

On the latter point, you’ll need significant customer feedback and insights to squeeze as much informational juice out of each trend. Maybe not every trend will be a hit. But every trend will be an opportunity to learn more about your customers. You’ll learn why they buy and don’t buy and what about your offering made them click “add to cart.” If you want to start collecting customer feedback in advance of a new summer trend, register with Bizrate Insights today to find out what your customers are thinking.