From politics to pop culture, the year’s best trending stories were by turns moving, surprising, and delightful. A New Yorker writer’s essay on a racist “Permit Patty” who called the police on an 8-year-old girl selling bottled water was in the move category, while Atul Gawande’s thoughtful magazine piece on doctors’ visceral hate for their computers hit the surprise-and-delight mark. And, in a year when celebrity chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain died, a New York Times reporter’s piece on the way his family reckoned with addiction hit the heart.
Product trends can shift quickly, so staying up-to-date on market shifts is a vital part of running an ecommerce business. We’ve identified the products that saw the biggest sales growth for Shopify merchants in 2025 and the quarters leading up to them, using organic search data from Google Trends.
For example, the year-over-year increase in leggings searches reflects a continued interest in activewear. Searches for specific styles, such as “foldover” and “flare” leggings, grew in popularity this past year, indicating that long-term product trends can spawn a variety of new iterations as sellers innovate to satisfy consumer demand.
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