What 2025 Taught Us About Building for 2026
At Maveron, our work across commerce, health, retail, and consumer AI revealed a consistent truth: durable consumer behavior beats hype cycles.
Here we’re sharing with you with the conversations happening across team Maveron — including what’s now & what’s next, perspectives beyond the boardroom, and the long view on consumer shifts we believe will stick around for the years ahead.
2025 was a year of clarification in the consumer space. After years of inflationary pressure on households and a lingering post-ZIRP hangover, the noise finally began to settle and a clearer signal emerged. The long-anticipated pullback in spending never fully materialized. Instead, consumer behavior highlighted resilience, especially during peak moments like Black Friday and Cyber Monday when deep sales were abundant. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, consumers spent more than $44 billion online, marking a 7.7% year-over-year increase, with Black Friday accounting for $11.8 billion in online sales, up 9.1% from last year.
Spending patterns may shift, but the consumer doesn’t disappear. They adapt. Consumers lean into early deals, familiar habits hold, and the consumer, long declared “dead,” keeps showing up. Inflation and affordability remain top concerns, especially as we see a rise in credit card delinquencies – but the pressure is shaping behavior rather than eliminating demand. After several years of skepticism, we believe investors are beginning to see this adaptation. Much like the shift to the internet and later to mobile, the step-change brought on by AI innovation doesn’t simply make the status quo more efficient; it completely reshapes how consumers behave.
As we reflect on what we learned across our focus areas in 2025, a pattern emerges. The companies that endure aren’t built on novelty or short-term hype. They’re built on fundamentals: products that embed into daily life and earn trust over time. As we head into 2026, the opportunity in consumer isn’t smaller. It’s evolving. With new technology expanding what’s possible, the surface area for durable, category-defining businesses is larger than what we’ve known before.
Below, we’re sharing a few of our key insights from 2025 and what we believe will define the enduring consumer companies to come, shaped by Maveron’s long history partnering with lasting brands.
The Consumer Brand Tech Stack Comes Into Focus
What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the next generation of enduring consumer brands will be defined not just by what they sell, but by the systems that power how they build. As AI reshapes the consumer-facing experience, it’s also transforming the backend that supports R&D, sourcing, inventory, and go-to-market execution.
Much of this infrastructure remains fragmented and relationship-driven, built for a slower era. AI changes that. We’re seeing the emergence of operating systems that connect consumer demand signals with product development and supply chains, allowing brands to make decisions closer to real time. When these systems work, product innovation and marketing stop operating in silos and move in tandem.
We have no doubt some of the next generation’s standouts will build the intelligence layer powering consumer brands, with the most compelling platforms compressing innovation cycles and enabling lean teams to out-execute incumbents. Ultimately, these are the players that will define how the next generation of consumer companies is built.
Health and Wellness Moves Full-Stack
Health and wellness remains a core focus for us, and 2025 brought sharp clarity around where we believe the next generation of enduring companies will be built. Longevity saw a surge of enthusiasm, with an outsized focus on testing and diagnostics. While these tools can be valuable, an overemphasis on data alone risks stopping short of what consumers really need.
We believe the most durable companies will move beyond point solutions toward fully verticalized care models, owning more of the end-to-end experience rather than simply generating insights. We’re imagining a One Medical–like approach: integrated, continuous, and designed around real outcomes, not just measurement.
As with past waves of healthcare innovation, integration will matter more than surface-level optimization, especially across women’s health and senior care – two demographics that are still underfunded and full of opportunity. In the latter, we have a strong belief in Sage, which just released a fully integrated fall-detection system. The opportunity is meaningful: in the U.S., an older adult falls every second, underscoring the need for solutions that combine tech and care into a single, cohesive experience.
The lesson from 2025 is that progress in health and wellness won’t come from more data alone, but from better systems. And, the companies that win will be those that turn insight into outcomes and deliver care in ways that feel truly integrated over time.
AI Rewrites the Consumer Purchase Experience
The consumer purchase experience is being rewritten as AI and large language models become the primary interface for search and discovery. Instead of navigating websites and ads, consumers will increasingly rely on AI to personalize options on their behalf. This shift is happening quietly at the infrastructure layer and more visibly at the application layer, where new products will reshape how consumers experience UI/UX and marketing.
We’re already seeing early signs of this in AI-native discovery tools and conversational commerce interfaces, but the biggest winners may not resemble anything we can easily imagine today. Just as it would have been challenging to predict the scale and influence of Shopify decades ago, many of the most valuable consumer companies of the next era will emerge from entirely new interaction models made possible by AI.
The real inflection point is about who gets to build. We’re beginning to see this in AI-powered design tools, no-code and low-code product builders, and agentic workflows that allow small teams (or even individuals) to test and scale consumer products that once required large organizations. While many AI tools still cater to technically fluent users, the next wave will dramatically expand access to creation. This is a pattern we’ve seen play out before – Adobe transformed Photoshop while Instagram brought creation to the masses. WordPress gave developers publishing tools, but Medium made it effortless for everyone. Garmin pioneered navigation and Google Maps made it accessible to billions. There’s a real opportunity to back innovators defining the inflection moment for vibe coding, when the power to build expands beyond the technical elite.
As software becomes easier to build, more consumers will become creators, and more creators will become entrepreneurs. That shift enables a new operating model as well: smaller teams, faster iteration, and familiar concepts reinvented in new ways – like multiple exceptional products living under a single brand, all made possible by AI-native workflows.
A Nation Stuck in Place
Homeownership is now less affordable than at any point in modern history, driven by the combined weight of elevated mortgage rates and historically stretched price-to-income ratios. In March 2022, the Fed began raising rates, pushing the 30-year fixed mortgage average up to ~6.72% and reshaping monthly payment math for everyday buyers. The result is a market where median home prices sit at an unprecedented 7.3x median income, and affordability has fallen to historic lows—leaving many consumers priced out, especially first-time and younger buyers.
This is creating what we describe as a “nation stuck in place”: existing homeowners hesitate to move because they don’t want to trade low-rate mortgages for higher payments, ultimately tightening supply and reducing mobility. In that environment, the most compelling consumer opportunities aren’t purely transactional. They’re structural. We’re seeing three durable areas of value creation emerge: affordability & alternative financing and home equity management.
But the biggest lesson from 2025 is that many “fixes” are fragile. Alternative financing models can break down in downturn scenarios, and legacy home equity players are locked in an expensive customer acquisition knife fight. The sustainable solution is ultimately macro — wages catching up and housing supply improving. But in the meantime, the companies that win will be the ones that build trusted consumer products inside today’s constraints, aligning incentives across homeowners, capital providers, and the businesses powering the model.
What Actually Matters Heading into 2026
One of the clearest lessons from 2025 is that even as technology opens new frontiers, the core of consumer remains. New tools and technology (AI, included) are changing how products are built and experienced, but they haven’t changed why consumers adopt them or what makes a remarkable company endure.
At Maveron, we continue to see that the same moats matter most: earning trust, becoming habitual, and, in many categories, owning more of the end-to-end experience rather than fragmenting it. AI doesn’t rewrite these fundamentals. It amplifies the opportunity for teams that already understand them. What has changed is the surface area for consumer innovation. Many of the most consequential consumer breakthroughs of the coming years won’t fit today’s mental models, just as it once would have been impossible to imagine the LLM wars or the advent of driverless cars. That uncertainty isn’t a weakness; it’s a signal that we’re early.
In 2026, the teams that pair new capabilities with enduring consumer principles will be the ones that define what comes next. We’re feeling energized and ready to put our learnings to work, backing the next generation of enduring companies.
On resilience
"Grit - it’s going to be hard to win without it. You can network all you want, get on stage at BevNet, do all the right things, but without being truly battle-ready, it’s going to be a tough road.”
— Richard Laver, Lucky Energy CEO and founder, on his mindset when it comes to building.