Trend Q&A: Harnessing data-driven insights and more

Navigating radical transparency, using data for seasonal planning and designing for accessibility. That and more on today’s episode.

Want to know what’s next? Listen to the show where our experts from around the globe unpack your biggest challenges. This week, WGSN’s CEO Carla Buzasi takes us to New York, Philadelphia and Portland to explore business strategies for adapting to radical transparency, empowering people with disabilities and working with data.

Watch the full episode below or read on for highlights of this episode:

Q: In an era of radical transparency, is clean beauty still relevant?
“As we reach a new post-natural era, what constitutes a brand or a product as sustainable will continue to shift and expand. Natural ingredients may not always be better for the environment. As an alternative, nature-identical ingredients will reduce the industry’s reliance on natural ecosystems and ‘synthetically made’ will be added to the beauty lexicon.

“Biotech and lab-grown innovations will help to shape this new narrative surrounding synthetics, especially as they start to gain acceptance via improved clean and green credentials.”
– Hannah Mauser, Beauty Analyst, WGSN
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Q: How can brands innovate through designing for people with disabilities?
“In the book Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, Kat Holmes discusses three inclusive design principles. First, recognising the exclusion of someone from a group, then acknowledging and learning from their diversity.

“Lastly, solving one problem and seeking to expand it for other people. Thoughtful co-design and taking time to listen to the lived experiences can be the future of impactful innovation.”
– Carmela Dow, Trend Researcher, WGSN
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Q: How can fashion retailers integrate data-informed decisions into their seasonal planning?
“Data-informed insights can be used to replace anecdotal observations such as ‘dresses are trending’. Our Mindset advisory team helps clients achieve this through competitive benchmarking, a methodology that indexes your product line against the market forecast. 

“TrendCurve+ predictive analytics forecast dresses to be a quarter of US womenswear by S/S 24. So while dresses are trending, if your dress range is more than 25% of total women’s, it’s outpacing the market and likely over-assorted.”
– Tommy Fahrner, Mindset Consultant Director, WGSN
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