How culture drives the economy

The economy is often explained through measures such as output, consumption, labor, and trade. These describe what is happening, but not why. Beneath them sits a quieter layer shaped by the zeitgeist, culture, and collective desire.

At scale, economies follow what people accept as normal and worth wanting. This is culture as coordination. When behavior aligns across millions of people, demand stabilizes, capital follows, and systems scale. Offtake is not random; it reflects shared belief. Some products lock into this layer. The iPhone did not just introduce a device; it standardized how people communicate and interact with the digital world. That alignment allowed entire industries to form around it.

Others never reach that point. Google Glass showed technical promise but failed to match social expectations. Virtual reality faces a similar gap: capability exists, but collective desire remains limited. The difference is not just innovation or timing. It is whether something fits the zeitgeist strongly enough to generate consistent offtake. That is where the economy is actually shaped.

When Products Become Systems: iPhone

Since its debut in 2007, the iPhone has transcended its role as a consumer device to become a primary architect of the modern global economy. With over 2.3 billion units sold, it did more than just capture market share; it constructed a $1.5 trillion ecosystem that encompasses hardware, services, and the “app economy.” This shift is underscored by the Apple App Store, which has paid out over $320 billion to developers and supports a global workforce of nearly 5 million people. Today, with 85% of the world’s population owning a smartphone, the iPhone serves as the essential infrastructure for platforms like Instagram and the trillion-dollar sectors of cloud computing and mobile data.

The device also redefined industrial production and resource management. It drives massive demand for critical inputs, consuming 15% of global cobalt and 30% of high-purity rare earth elements, while pushing the semiconductor market past $600 billion through its need for advanced sub-10nm chips. To meet this demand, Apple perfected a “just-in-time” manufacturing model of unprecedented scale, where partners like Foxconn employ over a million workers to produce half a million units daily. This model reinforced a distinct global specialization: high-value design and software remain concentrated in the U.S., where Apple captures up to 60% of product margins, while physical assembly and specialized component manufacturing are distributed across China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.

Ultimately, the iPhone represents a fundamental structural shift in how value is created and distributed. It pioneered the platform-based business models that now dominate 60% of the market capitalization of the world’s largest tech firms. By successfully aligning innovation with global capital and infrastructure, the iPhone did not merely grow a market; it reorganized the world’s value chains and redirected the trajectory of the global economic system.

It proves that sometimes, a product doesn’t just enter a market; it acts as a gravitational constant, demanding that carriers, developers, and even global supply chains align themselves to its orbit.

When the iPhone first arrived in 2007, it was an artifact from the future stranded in a primitive present. We often remember the polish of the launch, but we forget the vast digital desert that surrounded it. There was no App Store, no Instagram, and no Uber. Mobile data was a sluggish, expensive luxury, and “sharing a photo” usually meant tethering your phone to a desktop with a physical cable. The device possessed incredible potential, but the infrastructure to exploit it—the high-speed 4G networks, the cloud storage, and the global developer community simply did not exist.

Could we have guessed an entire civilization would form around it? Perhaps. But the iPhone’s true legacy isn’t just that it was a great product; it’s that it was so compelling it forced the world to rebuild itself. It was the “Hardware Big Bang” that necessitated the creation of a trillion-dollar software universe. It proves that sometimes, a product doesn’t just enter a market; it acts as a gravitational constant, demanding that carriers, developers, and even global supply chains align themselves to its orbit.

The zeitgeist, often described as the “spirit of the times,” is not just a collection of trends or moods. It is the underlying logic that defines what feels normal, desirable, and possible within a given moment.

It reflects the collective mindset of a society, shaping how people think, behave, and assign value. Rather than predicting the future, it reveals the conditions that make certain ideas, products, and behaviors more likely to emerge and scale.

In this sense, the zeitgeist is less about what is happening and more about why certain things take hold while others do not.

The rise of the avocado shows how a product can be reactivated by the zeitgeist.

What was once a regional fruit is now a global market worth over $20 billion, heading toward $22 billion. It is set to become one of the most traded tropical fruits, with exports expected to pass 3 million metric tons. Mexico supplies about half of global production and around 80% of U.S. imports, while countries like Peru and Colombia have scaled quickly to meet demand, with some countries growing export value by more than 20 to 50% year over year.

Consumption keeps rising, driven heavily by younger consumers and shifting diets. Europe is expanding steadily, while Asia is the fastest-growing region, with double-digit growth in some markets. The shift came from alignment. Health became central, food became linked to long-term performance, and simple formats like avocado toast turned into daily habits.

For a long time, fat was treated as something to avoid. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, low-fat diets dominated, and products were reformulated to remove fat wherever possible. Avocados, despite being nutrient-dense, did not fit that narrative.

The shift came when fat itself was redefined. Research and media began separating fats into categories, especially distinguishing saturated fats from unsaturated ones. Avocados were repositioned as a source of “good fat,” linked to heart health, energy, and longer-term wellbeing. That single reframing changed how the product was perceived.

At the same time, demand was actively created through repetition and visibility. Retail, food chains, and media pushed simple, repeatable formats like avocado toast, salads, and bowls. Social platforms amplified this, turning consumption into something visible and easy to copy. What people saw often, they started to adopt.

The avocado moved beyond its category and became a pattern. It appeared in product design, merchandise, graphics, and even cosmetics. Its shape, color, and associations with health and lifestyle made it easy to reuse across industries. It shifted from ingredient to symbol.

That is when demand stabilizes. Not just when people buy something, but when it embeds itself into behavior, aesthetics, and identity. Once that happens, the system scales around it.

Once that pattern formed, it reinforced itself. More demand led to more supply, more availability lowered prices, and easier access increased consumption. Health narratives gave it justification, while everyday use made it habitual.

Many products and ingredients go through periods of renewed relevance. They become cultural phenomena and reshape large parts of the economy. The iPhone created an entirely new ecosystem economy. Avocado expanded far beyond its Latin American origins and became a global staple. We see a similar pattern with matcha. A Western adaptation, the matcha latte, is now part of almost every barista’s repertoire.

The economic impact is significant. The global matcha market is projected to reach 6.7 billion dollars by 2029. By 2025, Japan’s green tea exports, heavily influenced by powdered matcha, were expected to surpass 72 billion yen, doubling the 2024 record. The United States is the largest importer, driving demand for high-quality, ceremonial-grade matcha. At the same time, tencha production, the raw material for matcha, was more than 2.5 times higher in 2024 than it was in 2014. Matcha has expanded beyond beverages into cosmetics and supplements, effectively creating its own ecosystem.

This shows how culture can pull a product into new markets and reshape supply chains.

In some cases, an industry establishes itself first, and only later faces the question of how to use what remains. Kangaroo leather built a strong position in the leather market, but this raised a practical challenge: what to do with the meat. Over time, kangaroo meat found its place in the Australian market, turning what was initially an underused byproduct into a mainstream food product.

Another example is polyester. The commercial development and widespread adoption of polyethylene terephthalate was driven by the availability of petrochemical byproducts. Although the chemistry was explored earlier, the key patent was filed in 1941, aligning with the rapid expansion of the petrochemical industry. Raw materials such as xylene and ethylene, previously byproducts, enabled large-scale production. Today, synthetic fibers dominate the global textile market.

These examples raise an important question: how can cultural momentum be used to shape new economic systems?

When it comes to hair, the foundation already exists. The global human hair trade is a rapidly growing, multibillion-dollar industry, projected to exceed 10 billion dollars by 2032. It is driven by demand for wigs and extensions.

These industries are well established. Wigs, extensions, and toppers are widely used. Some reports suggest that over 50% of the general population uses some form of artificial hair. More than 2 million women in North America try wigs annually. The global hair extension market alone is expected to reach 5.36 billion dollars by 2026. Some estimates suggest that up to 87 to over 90% of women consider or use hair extensions at some point, and around 34% include them in their regular beauty routine.

Alongside this, the hair care market is massive. It was valued at 113.93 billion dollars in 2025 and is expected to grow to 216.94 billion dollars by 2034, with a compound annual growth rate of 7.46%. Europe held the largest share in 2025, at 36.67%.

However, these interconnected industries also generate significant waste. Hair from salons, unused material, offcuts, and post-consumer waste are often discarded. This leads to a key opportunity. What if this existing system could be connected and expanded into a broader hair-based product economy, using both first-cycle and recycled materials?

Hair is already culturally accepted and supported by a global supply chain. The question is what else this system can offer. Resourcefulness becomes critical here. Waste represents lost economic value, but it can also become a source of innovation.

Current cultural shifts point toward health, not only in food but also in everyday products, including textiles and fragrances. There is a growing demand for transparency, fairness, and more balanced systems. Overdependence on limited resources creates economic and security risks.

A decentralised, locally engaged system could address this. It could allow people to actively participate in the economy, seeing it not just as abstract growth but as an interconnected system.

The current cultural shift reflects a move toward transparency, equality, and participation. The question now is how to build a new system that uses existing cultural acceptance, established supply chains, and unused material potential to create a more participatory and resource-efficient economy.

Hair as a product is already part of the current cultural moment. Now is the time for its system to expand into a broader network and create a more resilient and resourceful economy around it. If hair waste can be transformed into new materials, it will not only create new markets but also bring greater accountability to the extensions and wig industry. This creates a win-win situation. It becomes a question of when more underutilised byproducts will gain market share, and how innovation will help build a stronger economic system centred on this raw material supply.