2025 observations and road to 2026

I hope you had a chance to step away from the business this past week to enjoy the people and experiences that remind us why we do this work in the first place. This is my last email of the year, a free-form reflection on the 2025 general business observations that I believe will shape the landscape of 2026. I will be back in your inbox with this newsletter on January 18th.

If you would like to discuss helping your Amazon or DTC business in the coming year, please feel free to reply to this email at any time. I will stay plugged in with the client work and 1:1 conversations.

Discernment of the public square

Our public square has expanded to the limits of the digital universe through technology and the ubiquity of social media. Today everyone is a creator, everyone is a publisher. While this democratization is a gift, the resulting noise can become overwhelming. We all could use more discernment of what we allow into our internal world from the public square. Another founder sharing their achievements or sales wins that creates instant reaction of ‘why not me’. An endless stream of tactics promising to reach specific goals, the weight of trends, FOMOs, etc. All that adds up in our cognitive space and can cloud our business decisions. The public square often poses as a teacher, but a meaningful public square gives us the signals and threads that let us trust ourselves more with what we already know. Validation, a word of caution, or a shared experience that resonates are all examples of these meaningful signals. A lot of this help comes from our small circle of loved ones and trusted peers. But I put this under the "public square" point because, sadly, many of us are now plugged into the public square more than we are within our own small circles.

The Right Obsessions 

I live in an area famous for wood art called alebrijes, which are Mexican folk art sculptures of mythical creatures. They are carved from wood and painted in vibrant colors. It is true wood-carving art, requiring a level of attention to detail and patience that is almost impeccable. Most of the artists who make them don’t even have a high school education, but to me they possess a true artist’s soul, with a quality that is becoming more valuable because it is more rare: an obsession with one thing, where excellence and expertise are combined with art. Brands that do well obsess about a few things, the most common being the product itself. If we obsess about the product and our customer, we have a much better chance to win.

One note here: it is helpful to keep in mind the Goodhardt’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Sometimes in Amazon space I see an obsession with metrics (ex: ACOS), but we need to be careful with obsessions over KPIs and not lose sight of what they truly represent.

Better Outcome or Better Process 

Thinking about excellence and deeper expertise makes me question whether, when we talk about efficiency and the use of AI, we are just going for a better process or a better outcome. Do we want to achieve a better goal, or simply get to an average one faster or cheaper? At times we lack tolerance for long timelines, obsessing over reaching X revenue by Y date. But if we allow ourselves to stretch the horizon and dare to aim for a more ambitious goal, perhaps that will make the journey better? One of my mentors says that when she sets an ambitious goal and doesn’t hit it, she doesn’t change the goal, she just moves the timeline.

Taking a stance

In our collective desire for inclusivity and serving everybody, we seem to have become afraid of taking a stance. In business, I see this manifest as wanting our products to be for all customers. Or and upbeat and ‘nice’ messaging from a brand that is so watered down, that I don’t even know what the brand stands for. A healthy amount of confidence, clarity on who you are, where you are going, who you serve can also be a filter for irrelevant advice or energy draining noise. Taking a stance does not always need to be a public declaration (a.k.a. ‘we are not for...’); it can also be an internal commitment to depth over breadth. It can mean choosing to dive deep into specific niches and communities before going broad (think customers or distribution). I believe taking a stance will become increasingly valuable because of ongoing social fragmentation and growing distrust aided by AI content; however, on the positive side, it meets the rising desire for a human, premium touch and true personalization in marketing.

How I can help you with Amazon or DTC in 2026

Several ways we can partner in 2026: Amazon strategy, oversight, full-channel management. Go-to-market for DTC and Amazon, ecommerce growth planning and execution oversight

Happy New Year,

Irina