Everyone loves ‘whimsymaxxing,’ including your local craft store

Whimsy can take many forms: a walk home among the flowers, collecting colorful oddities, or, perhaps, bedazzling any surface in sight with shimmering stick-on jewels. By late summer, so-called “whimsymaxxxing” acquired a much more specific meaning. People began affixing huge, colorful gem stickers en masse to their faces, dogs, cars, water bottles, phone cases, and truly any other imaginable surface. Across social media people showed off their bedazzled . . . everything. But to particpate in whimsymaxxing, you need sheets of gem stickers. Lots and lots of stickers. The bedazzling trend has led stores that sell crafting products to restock and reposition their products to meet the moment. “The search on our internal site for ‘bedazzling kit’ grew by 69,000 searches from May to August—that’s a crazy number,” said Stacey Shively, chief merchandising officer at Michaels. “If you look at the word ‘bedazzle,’ that increased by 18,000.” And it’s not just at Michaels. Target has similarly seen a noticeable increase in demand for gem items, beginning over the summer. For a retailer like Michaels, feeding the hunger for gems is no problem. “We have all the pieces and kit parts,” Shively say…