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Consumer Goods Trends & Challenges 2026–2029: Five Shifts and How to Solve Them
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Five market shifts reshaping how consumer goods brands in Europe reach shoppers through 2029 — AI-mediated discovery, the D2C/wholesale rebalance, fragmented marketplace data, branded resale, and the EU digital product passport — and how Vaneigens helps solve each one.
Five market shifts are reshaping how consumer goods companies in Europe reach shoppers between 2026 and 2029 — from AI-mediated discovery and the direct-to-consumer rebalance to circular resale and new EU transparency rules. For each shift below you'll find the problem it creates and how Vaneigens helps solve it with the Salesforce platform.
The problem. 84% of European shoppers now use AI tools daily, and 38% actively use them to research products and decide what to buy — roughly half already ask an AI assistant to compare options before purchasing. For a consumer goods company, this matters regardless of which shop eventually sells the product: if an AI assistant can't find accurate, structured information about a product, the brand may simply not get recommended at all, no matter how good its relationship with retailers is. Yet a survey of European consumer goods leaders found that even as companies increase AI spending, most are still running small pilot projects rather than making AI a working part of how they reach customers.
How Vaneigens helps. Vaneigens can set up Salesforce's customer data platform (Data Cloud) so a company's product and ingredient information is organised and accurate enough for AI tools to find and recommend correctly, wherever the product is actually sold, and build a company-owned AI assistant (using Salesforce's Agentforce) that can answer shopper questions directly on the brand's own website.
Sources: McKinsey & Company, Rewiring Retail in Europe: The AI Imperative; McKinsey & Company, The AI Paradox in Europe's Consumer Industries
The problem. After years of pushing sales toward their own websites and apps, Nike and Adidas have both been rebuilding their wholesale relationships with retailers, since selling everything directly turned out to be more expensive and harder to scale than expected — while still wanting to keep the benefits of owning a direct relationship with shoppers. Getting this balance wrong in either direction is costly: too much direct selling strains retailer relationships and inflates marketing costs; too little means losing the customer data and margin that come with direct sales.
How Vaneigens helps. Vaneigens can bring a company's own online sales and its wholesale/retail-partner sales into one place using Salesforce's customer data platform (Data Cloud), so decisions about where to invest are based on real numbers instead of guesswork, and build a retail-partner portal (using Salesforce's Experience Cloud) so wholesale partners always work from the same up-to-date product and pricing information as the company's own website.
The problem. Nearly 79% of European brands now sell across several online marketplaces at once, such as Amazon, Zalando, or Bol.com, rather than relying on just one. Each of these has its own reporting, its own rules, and its own limits on what information it shares back with the company whose product it's selling. That leaves a consumer goods company without a full picture of who is actually buying its products, or how sales are performing from one retail partner to the next.
How Vaneigens helps. Vaneigens can bring together whatever sales and customer information a company does have access to — from its own website, its wholesale partners, and any data marketplaces do share — into one place using Salesforce's customer data platform (Data Cloud), giving the business one comparable view instead of checking each retailer's own dashboard separately.
The problem. Europe's resale clothing market is expected to grow from about €16 billion in 2024 to €26 billion by 2030, and sales through brands' own resale programmes grew 300% between 2021 and 2025, as secondhand sales overall are growing two to three times faster than sales of new items. Shoppers increasingly expect to trade in or buy pre-owned items directly from the brand itself rather than through an outside resale platform, but running that kind of programme means tracking individual items, their condition, and trade-in credits in a way most companies' existing systems were never built for.
How Vaneigens helps. Vaneigens can use Salesforce's commerce platform (Commerce Cloud) to build a resale storefront alongside a company's regular online store, and its customer data platform (Data Cloud) to connect a shopper's original purchase with any later trade-in or resale activity — giving the company one full picture of that customer relationship instead of treating resale as a separate, disconnected business.
Sources: FashionNetwork, Europe's Secondhand Fashion Market Projected to Reach €26 Billion by 2030; The Business of Fashion & McKinsey, The State of Fashion 2026
The problem. Under new European Union rules, products sold in Europe will need a "digital product passport" — essentially a structured, scannable digital record covering what a product is made of, where its materials came from, how long it should last, and how to dispose of it — phased in by product type from 2027 onward, with market access itself at stake for companies that can't provide it. For most consumer goods companies, this information currently sits scattered across product records, supplier paperwork, and factory documents rather than in one usable place.
How Vaneigens helps. This is a data and systems project, not a packaging redesign one — exactly the kind of work Vaneigens does. Vaneigens can connect a company's existing product, material, and supplier records into one place using Salesforce's customer data platform (Data Cloud) and integration tool (MuleSoft), and build simple tracking so the business can see its readiness ahead of each deadline rather than scrambling at the last minute.
Source: European Commission, Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and Digital Product Passport