Everyone loves ‘whimsymaxxing,’ including your local craft store

Дата публикации: 28-09-2026 10:00:00

Whimsy can take many forms: a walk home among the flowers, collecting colorful oddities, or, perhaps, bedazzling any surface in sight with shimmering stick-on jewels. 
By late summer, so-called “whimsymaxxxing” acquired a much more specific meaning. People began affixing huge, colorful gem stickers en masse to their faces, dogs, cars, water bottles, phone cases, and truly any other imaginable surface. Across social media people showed off their bedazzled . . . everything.
But to particpate in whimsymaxxing, you need sheets of gem stickers. Lots and lots of stickers. The bedazzling trend has led stores that sell crafting products to restock and reposition their products to meet the moment. “The search on our internal site for ‘bedazzling kit’ grew by 69,000 searches from May to August—that’s a crazy number,” said Stacey Shively, chief merchandising officer at Michaels. “If you look at the word ‘bedazzle,’ that increased by 18,000.”
And it’s not just at Michaels. Target has similarly seen a noticeable increase in demand for gem items, beginning over the summer. For a retailer like Michaels, feeding the hunger for gems is no problem.
“We have all the pieces and kit parts,” Shively says. As soon as certain terms begin making waves, the company’s e-commerce team will create a bundle using the searched words like “bedazzle” or “whimsymaxxxing,” and they’ll similarly recode and tag items on Google. “Once we see terms like that search come up, we act really fast and try and pivot it so that it shows up for the customer in a really nice way,” she says.
A trend like this works well for Michaels, because the company doesn’t have to shorten its buying cycle—it already has tons of gem inventory. It just becomes a matter of presenting it in a way that resonates with customers trying to hop onto the microtrend du jour. 
But what happens if your inventory isn’t already brimming with gorpcore or tomatocore or whatever else folks are maxxxing on at the moment? Stores need to decide quickly how they’re going to handle these algorithm-fueled trends, which often crest and crash in dizzyingly short periods of time. 
“Your normal pipeline might be 46 weeks to develop and produce and get it to stores,” says Catriona Van Dyck, associate partner with Columbus Consulting, a retail consulting firm. Businesses could cut “that down to where you could get product in four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks—that kind of Zara model,” she says, referring to the fast fashion retailer. But even that turnaround time might be too long. “The business has to gauge, how fast could this change? By the time you get it, it may be over,” Van Dyck says.
She advises retailers to stay close to their customers, “whether it’s through studies, whether it’s through customer feedback, whether it’s through observing customers and interacting with them in the stores or online,” because their interest ultimately determines whether it makes sense to be involved with any given trend. “It’s really the relevance of what the trend is and how that relates to your customer,” she says. 
But even if the term “whimsymaxxxing” is new, Shively at Michaels says that “making things shiny has been, I would say, on an upward trend for the last two and half to three years.” In house, Michaels refers to it as “diamond art,” and Shively traces it back to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which “changed our jewelery business in a big way.” The retailer followed the tour’s schedule to make sure nearby locations were fully stocked in the lead-up to a concert. (More recently, you can thank Kylie Jenner’s bejeweled “dream princess kitty bday night” for turbocharging the trend.)
But even though the Eras Tour is long over, Michaels is still replenishing its gems on a weekly basis. With school back in, Shively expects more gems to sell for game days and sorority events, and the holidays are just around the bend. “People always want to be glitzed out and glam for New Year’s,” she says. 
Expect Michaels to keep having gem stickers in “all the colors for people, all the different styles,” Shively says. “We really try and invest in that for the long haul, knowing that it’s our core proposition.”
Allie Joy, an art therapist and cohost of The Creative Collective Podcast, hopes whimsymaxxxing as a trend can be a gateway for playfulness and creativity, rather than a be-all and end-all.
“It feels like it’s being very narrowed down to just this, putting gems on things we can buy or single-use things,” Joy says. “I just hope it doesn’t turn people off of the concept of whimsy and be averted to whimsical things because it’s so much more than just the little stickers. . . . For me, whimsy is introducing some of the lightness back into our life, maybe embracing our inner child.”

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