When Your Category Is Declining, This Is the Move Most Leaders Miss

If you're staring at a shrinking product line or a flattening category and wondering why the old playbook isn't working — this episode is for you. The uncomfortable truth: the wrong question is "How do we bring it back?" The better question is "What should we become next?"

Benno walks through two real-world examples that make this concrete:

🪑 Pottery Barn: A legendary dining chair is past its peak. Everyone wants a replacement inside the same category. Instead of chasing a forced sequel, Benno pitches a coffee table — one that fits retail merchandising, serves the brand DNA, and opens a gateway to console tables, side tables, and upholstery. A smart lateral move beats a heroic repair every time.

💡 A lighting company boxed in by a flat, declining category debates selling furniture — and runs straight into the usual objections: new factories, new sourcing, new sales training, new product nuances. We break down how a clear go-to-market roadmap turns those objections into solvable steps, and how repositioning from "lighting brand" to "home decor company" unlocks a much bigger market.

Growth rarely comes from doubling down on what's declining. It comes from seeing what's adjacent — and having the clarity to move there.

What's the best adjacent move you're considering right now? Drop it in the comments.

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Always growing.

Benno Duenkelsbuehler 

CEO & Chief Sherpa of (re)ALIGN 

reALIGNforResults.com

benno@realignforresults.com 

Transcript

Decline Is A Signal

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I think as business owners, CEOs, executives, uh we all face declining parts of the business. Could be a declining product category, a declining sales channel. And the first instinct is always fix it, right? Used to work great, fix it. Something, you know, what went wrong, but that is oftentimes the wrong question to ask, right? It um what used to work doesn't necessarily work anymore and will never work again.

Pottery Barn And The Wrong Fix

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Uh so I'll give you two examples where I um asked a very different question, right? Um one was I was a furniture buyer at Pottery Barn back in the day, and I had the misfortune of taking over a legacy product that the the my predecessor had developed, this amazingly successful dining chair that I took over and it was post-peak, right? It was declining. And you know, everybody from you know the other buyers to the VP of merchandising to you know the CEO was like, Ben, you have to find the next dining chair. And we tried valiantly. And and and that was just that was a sort of a one-hit wonder. Um, and that was not the right question to ask. And I found a coffee table, and I was like, guys, this coffee table is gonna be a multi-million dollar success story just like that dining chair. But there was so much resistance against that. Uh, well, you know, you have to replace inside that category, you have to create new success uh revenue uh success, and we don't really do coffee tables, and the merchandising doesn't really work. Um, and you know, there were a million reasons why I was being given flack about developing and introducing a coffee table instead of a dining chair. Uh so I had kind of sold the story, um, and I and I showed them how the merchandising could work really well around coffee tables, how the brand DNA was very well served by coffee tables instead of dining chairs, or in addition to, and that it would also offer us a gateway to expansion, right? Because if you're bringing in a coffee table, now you can bring in you know console tables and side tables and end tables and all kinds of other things, and you can get into upholstery. Anyway, so that was the the better question to ask was couldn't a coffee table become the new dining

Turning A Lighting Brand Into Home Decor

SPEAKER_00 2:24

chair? Another example was uh one of our first clients, uh, a lighting company. Uh uh, they they were uh market leader inside that lighting category, but the category was flat to declining. Um and I I was brought in to ask to answer the question hey, could we sell furniture? A lot of our lighting buyers are lighting and furniture buyers, you know, at the retail stores. Um they're buying lamps and furniture. Um but and the CEO and I would sort of brainstorm around that, and again, there was a lot of resistance around bringing in furniture. Yeah, but that's made in different factories, so that's a completely different sourcing phase. And now the lamp salespeople have to learn how to sell furniture, which requires uh different sales training and product training and their different nuances to selling that adjacent category called furniture uh different is different from lighting, right? So we had to go back to also the brand DNA of a lighting company and sort of reconfigure that as DNA of a home furnishings company and a home decor company. Um so we had to be very mindful of the brand DNA that was to the brand DNA that will be. And then I built a roadmap around how do you design uh furniture differently from lamps, how do you source it differently from lamps, how do you, you know, the product development timeline and execution is different. Um, but once I built the roadmap, it became clear to the CFO that there was a much bigger market around furniture than lamps. It became clear to the CMO and the head product person that um yeah, this was absolutely uh uh gonna be accepted by the customer. Um and it became clear to the CEO that, you know, now that I built the roadmap, it was actually very feasible to execute this efficiently and effectively and profitably, right? Um and and we very quickly, you know, built from zero to three million dollars of revenue in the first year to ten million in the second year, to twenty-six million dollars in the third year, because we had answered the better question of not how do you reinvent lamps and inside a lamp company, but how do you make it into a home decor

The Power Of A Clear Roadmap

SPEAKER_00 4:58

company? Uh, just like earlier, you know, uh, how do you um re uh you know the dining chair could be a coffee

Reinventing Your Company Starts Here

SPEAKER_00 5:07

table. So um think about how this applies to your business, and I'd love to help you to just kind of think through it and walk through how your next dining chair might be a coffee table. Uh DM me, uh comment uh uh down below uh and let's get on a call and and and talk through how do we reinvent your company so that you can maybe access much bigger channels of distributions or adjacent categories and