I truly can’t figure out why you would use a trait in a situation as above. You can better inject the Brand object through type hinted method parameters. This way you can also mock the object during testing.

Or perhaps you’re looking for something called the repository pattern. This serves as a class between your controller and model where you define the methods who interact with the model. Models will be used for defining relationships, scopes, accessors and mutators etc. Repositories will then be used for defining the data logic methods. Take a look a this library of mine, it makes working with repositories a breeze:

MrAtiebatie/laravel-repositories