If you’re scratching your head about why “Canada just made an EV deal with China,” you’re not alone. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a landmark trade agreement with China that reduces tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles from a near-ban to a quota system with a much lower duty — allowing roughly 49,000 Chinese EVs annually at a 6.1 % tariff instead of the previous 100 % barrier. In return, China is cutting devastating tariffs on Canadian farm exports like canola and other...
1 day ago • 2 min read
Vision needs oxygen, but it also needs gravity. Reader Terry from New York wrote me after my recent post Every Inventor Needs a Trusted Skeptic, and his question is a good one. “I can see how innovators can fool themselves about an inflated Total Addressable Market,” he wrote. “You always want to project everyone who might buy the product. Investors need to share the fullest vision, stakeholders and team members have to see all the potential, and can’t be expected to on their own. How do you...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Uncertainty talks. Behavior decides. Lately, I keep hearing the same refrain, especially from Millennials. Cutting back. Tightening budgets. Buying less. Then I looked at the numbers. Planned holiday spending among Millennials jumped 30 percent year over year, hitting $896, the highest of ANY generation. The talk is cautious. The behavior, not so much. This gap matters. Public sentiment reflects uncertainty: emotional, social, defensive. Real purchasing decisions are quieter and more honest....
3 days ago • 1 min read
Could the most powerful signal a brand sends be the one it never planned? Reader Alex from Cleveland wrote me after my Knorr post and asked something intriguing: “You wrote about cooking being a green flag in a dating profile, but Knorr’s logo is literally a green flag. Coincidence, or are brands sometimes sitting on symbolism they don’t even realize?” Short answer: yes, all the time. Most brands think symbolism is something you add, and sometimes it is. Like a color choice. A logo tweak. Or...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Buyers dislike higher prices, but they do expect them. This month, Dollar Tree stores in the U.S. began adding items in the $10 range. That would have been unthinkable not very long ago. It feels jarring. At the same time, it is also fairly predictable. Sigh. Had to happen, right? Inflation does what it always does. It lifts baselines. The psychological floor price moves up, and buyers recalibrate even while whining about it. That tension affects product makers everywhere, not just in the...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Pre-orders are becoming one of the safest ways to launch physical products. I have seen this pattern increase across categories. When given the option, many customers legitimately like to pre-order. Not begrudgingly or impatiently. Happily. They want a guaranteed place in line. They want to feel early and proactive … not rushed. And they want to put the ordering process behind them, now. Tools like Shopify’s pre-order and reservation plugins have made this far easier to do without surprises...
6 days ago • 1 min read
Belief builds products, and objectivity gets them bought. I recently worked with an inventor developing really cool new product. Let’s call it a compact water filtration system, to protect the guilty. Who in this case is a really nice guy. Smart. Capable. Utterly convinced the market was gi-normous. His math was ambitious. Three billion possible buyers worldwide. Everyone and their dog drinks water. Everyone needs cleaner water. Therefore, EVERYONE with a wall plug-in might become a customer....
7 days ago • 1 min read
Mid-January is often when supply reality catches up with roadmaps. This time, things are tougher than ever. Late last year, a major constraint tightened across consumer hardware. Global memory shortages, driven by DRAM and NAND capacity being pulled toward AI and data-center demand, began pushing up prices and stretching lead times for the kind of memory almost all embedded devices rely on. This is a structural reallocation and not a temporary hiccup. For years, memory sat in the BOM as a...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Even in 2026, necessity and value beat novelty way more often than we want to think. I see a contrarian signal hiding in plain sight right now. Despite all the noise around emerging tech, retail reinvention and AI-driven everything, consumer buying behavior is staying stubbornly grounded. Value first. Essentials prioritized. Discretionary buys and upsells getting swatted away like pesky flies. McKinsey’s latest consumer research confirms what many founders feel but few plan around. Households...
9 days ago • 1 min read
