The Hidden Cost of Waiting on Research

by Dan Leahy, Co-Founder & CEO

Retail leaders don’t lack creativity. They lack time. And that time pressure is exactly why an industry built on consumer demand has been so slow to adopt structured insights into its process.

Compared to industries like CPG, retail has historically lagged in its use of research. While CPG teams rely on data to shape everything from packaging to pricing, retail and fashion brands have often leaned on instinct, trend cycles, and the creative vision of a few leaders.

That model can work when the stakes are lower, or when brands are small or nimble. But as businesses scale, product decisions carry more weight, and the cost of being wrong adds up quickly.

Here’s the irony: from the outside, product creation looks slow. From sketches to final line sheets, timelines can stretch across seasons or even years.

But inside that process, every decision moves quickly. Testing windows are tight. Iteration time is limited. Cross-functional pressure never stops.

What looks like a long runway quickly turns into a sprint. Decisions that once felt early suddenly feel late. Entire seasons can slip by before you realize you’re behind.

That is what makes traditional research so difficult to integrate. It is not that teams don’t want insights. They just don’t have time for the overhead, scoping studies, recruiting respondents, building surveys, or waiting for readouts.

It does not line up with the pace of the work. So teams fall back on gut feel. It is faster. It does not require coordination and in a lot of cases, it is the only option that fits the window.

But as product portfolios expand and consumer expectations shift, that instinct-based model starts to crack. Speed without clarity becomes a liability. And at scale, those misses multiply quickly.

This isn’t just a research problem. It’s a workflow problem. Traditional research was built for one-off studies, big strategic bets, and fixed timelines.

That model doesn’t work in the day-to-day realities of modern retail. The calendar doesn’t pause for fieldwork. Merchants can’t delay assortments to wait for readouts. Designers can’t test one idea per month. Insights need to work at the speed of the business, or they get skipped.

And when that happens, insights get siloed. Research sits in decks instead of tools. Strategic questions get separated from execution. Consumer feedback becomes something referenced after the fact instead of something teams build with along the way.

So the challenge isn’t “how do we do more research?”

It’s “how do we make insights usable?”

What retail teams need is a new model. One that is:

• Always available, not one-time
• Fast enough to match decision cycles
• Lightweight enough to use without scoping a project
• Accurate enough to trust and defend in a meeting
• Flexible enough to support creative work without slowing it down

That’s the future of insights. Not research as a bottleneck, but a flywheel that keeps ideas moving. Not decks that gather dust, but clarity teams can act on in the moment.

It isn’t about more reports or heavier processes. It’s about creating systems that keep pace with the work, fuel creativity with confidence, and let teams make real-time decisions. Because in an industry moving as fast as retail does, no decision should be skipped due to lack of time.

Dan

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PS: The future belongs to the brands that learn the fastest. See how MakerLabs helps make that possible.