Nina Petrov

I came to this beat from market research. For nine years I worked for a Zagreb-based consultancy running consumer studies for FMCG clients across Southeast Europe — cosmetics, personal care, small appliances, the whole toothpaste-adjacent world. Adult products were sitting in an obvious blind spot for the entire research industry. Nobody was fielding meaningful consumer studies. Nobody was tracking category growth with any rigour. Nobody could tell you, with data, how the Balkan adult market compared to Central Europe or Western Europe. I decided that was a beat I could actually contribute to.

I joined the editorial board in 2020 as its first dedicated trends editor. My work sits at the intersection of consumer research, retail reporting, and regulatory tracking. I write about the shape of the market — how it’s growing, where it’s growing, who’s buying, why they’re buying, how their behaviour is changing, and what the underlying drivers are. Where reliable data exists I use it. Where it doesn’t I say so, and I don’t pretend to certainty I don’t have.

Some of the ongoing threads I care about most: the ecommerce transition in adult retail (later and messier than most consumer categories), the discretion-versus-openness tension in consumer preferences, the cross-border trade patterns that emerge when regulation and pricing differ sharply across borders, the slow but real professionalisation of the sector’s supply chain, and the demographic broadening of the customer base beyond the industry’s traditional assumptions.

I try to write about trends without succumbing to trend-piece cliches. Not every quarterly shift is a “revolution.” Not every new product category is disrupting anything. My job is to distinguish real change from noise, and to give readers a framework for understanding the industry that will still be useful in five years.

Outside of this work I sit on the board of a small Croatian consumer research non-profit and I row on the Sava when the weather permits.