Hey, and welcome back to The Interline Podcast. 

Before we go any further, I want you to take a pause and to think about the products or the collection you’re working on right now. Unless you’re in the car, in which case definitely don’t pause driving, but think about what you were working on the last time you were at your desk. How far ahead of the market is the work you’re doing right now? Whether you work for a company that has a season-driven model or a more seasonless one based on more routine new product introductions, the odds are you’re planning, designing, engineering, sourcing, or getting ready to commercialise and market something that won’t actually be on shelves or on the racks for a while. How do you try and account for the difference between what you decide to make and what your target demographic will actually want at the moment it arrives? Do you think the delta between those two things is shrinking? 

I’m willing to bet that you’re probably not accounting for it based purely on vibes and intuition, just putting a finger in the air, but neither are you betting completely on raw and objective data. Somewhere in between those two things is fashion’s most Gordian knot. It’s a combined art and science mess, forecasting demand and culture and trying to conceive products that are far enough ahead to resonate and create desire, but also grounded enough to actually go into the supply chain and then come out successfully at the other end. 

It feels like maybe that’s becoming a harder exercise than ever, or maybe I’m just thinking about it wrong. We do think about the right timeline to predict technology adoption and diffusion to here at the Interline, but I know I’m not the right person to really tell you what’s going on in forecasting, how that exercise is being impacted by AI, or what consumer cohorts are going to be out there two years from now. 

I do, though, happen to know somebody who is: Carla Buzasi, who is the CEO of WGSN, a role she’s held since 2018. She was the company’s Global Chief Content Officer for three years before that. And she was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post UK prior to that. 

Carla and I are both media people who’ve made their way into the inner machinery of consumer and product driven industries, but in very different ways. So, I wanted to talk to her today to get a handle on how the business of forecasting itself is changing. And I want to ask her what it means, practically speaking, to be ahead of the market in a way that fits the kind of company you are and the type of products you make. 

I’ve been looking forward to this episode for a while. I think you’re going to enjoy it and hopefully take some of it back with you to your desk. 

Okay, let’s get going.

NB. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

Okay, Carla Buzasi, welcome to The Interline Podcast.

Thank you very much for having me.

Not at all. Pleasure is all on this side of the table. 

Now, you are the CEO of WGSN. And I want to start with, tell me what an average day looks like for you, insofar as any of us has an average day.

Okay, technically I’m based in the UK, but we have got clients in 94 countries, I think, as of today – that goes up and down a little bit each month. And I’ve got staff in 16 countries. So I would say lots of Mondays involve Heathrow Airport and flying somewhere elsewhere in the world. 

But if it’s a UK-based day, our office is in Holborn, and it’s going to say “hi” to the team and the various dogs. We have dogs in our office as well. Disco the dog, probably the most famous. And then it’s a balance between meeting clients. I spend a lot of time out and about talking to our clients. Our clients love coming into our office as well. We have a very beautiful little office as one would hope from trend forecasters, our interiors team made sure all the colours were absolutely on point. So lots of time with clients, lots of one-to-ones with the team. There’s just the normal operations of running a big business.

We’re private equity owned, so board meetings every month and chatting to board members as well. And I get pretty hands-on with the team. I don’t know whether they like that or loathe that, but, you know, looking at what we’re posting out on socials, reading through white papers, signing off on big significant forecasts and also evolving our product. So we’ve doubled the size of our product and engineering team over the past couple of years. And we are pushing out new features all the time. And so prioritisation of that and making sure that what we’re doing is something that is going to make our clients more successful, which is at the end of the day, what I’m here to deliver.

wgsn

Okay, fabulous, and I’m also a notorious pain in the ass when it comes to being hands-on with stuff, so you’re in good company in that respect. Now, I always like putting a definition question early in these shows and in these conversations, and for you I’m going to pick a really fundamental one. Right now, in this moment, what is a forecast and why are they valuable?

Excellent. Okay, so a forecast for us is telling our clients, telling the industries that we serve, what is going to happen next. And next could be tomorrow, next could be in 10 years’ time. And different industries work on different time scales. So if we’re talking to the auto industry, we’re projecting much further in the future. If we’re talking to, you know, a mass market fashion brand, then we will probably be looking at, you know, four to six months.

Our sweet spot is 18-24 months. And we are really, really accurate at that point because of a long methodology, which I could go into, but ensuring essentially that anyone who’s utilising WGSN services knows how consumer behaviour is going to evolve the big kind of trends that are moving lifestyle behaviours, and then the products and experiences that will be needed in those future states.

Okay, that’s a good answer. And why is that 12-18 months the sweet spot? What is it about that time scale that makes it work?

So much further out, you’re in what you call speculative futures. So, you know, will we be living on the moon type thing. And that kind of thing is much harder to predict when that will actually happen. But that 18-24 months is kind of a sweet spot for lots of industries in terms of forward planning. So if you’re in the food and beverage industry, you’re already working on Christmas 2027 because production times are that long. You know, you can’t create a new …I was going to say alcopop, I’m not sure why that came to mind.

I feel like that ages both you and me that I didn’t even question that. 

Maybe it’s because one of the stepsons is turning 16 this week, maybe that’s why I’m thinking about alcopops. But if you’re creating a new, let’s say a condiment, that’s gonna take probably 12-18 months to actually get into production, and then you’ve got to work out the packaging and the marketing of it and things like that.

We have to be that far out. And that far out is something that we have honed, we have perfected that methodology so we can do it really, really accurately. 

When you’re doing the much shorter term forecasts, it’s not only more difficult to get those products into production, but it’s much, much more expensive as well. You’re better off the longer lead times you’ve got, you can do that in a much more economical way. And everybody, every business around the world, no matter what you’re creating, needs to be thinking about its bottom line. So that’s why that’s the timeframe that we typically publish most of our forecasts for.

WGSN

And I feel like the key nugget from that is that your product calendar really determines how far you should be looking because that’s what influences how far you are, how capable you are of reacting to changes in the market.

Exactly, and you know, just to kind of labour the point a little bit, if you’re in the beauty industry and you’re doing a new moisturiser, you’ve got to source those ingredients. They’ve got to go through rigorous lab testing. If it’s certain kinds of ingredients that might need FDA clearance or those kinds of things. So it’s very difficult to create a successful product in 24 hours.

Yeah, duly noted. I won’t try. 

Okay. From a product point of view on your end then, what does WGSN actually look like? What share of the company’s workload is what I would define as services? So reports, insights, bespoke consulting versus software and platform development. And the reason I’m asking is I’m always interested to know how this shakes out because in my experience, maybe you’re going to buck the trend, but in my experience, it seems like every analytics data and insights business really wants to bring in as many users as possible who can self-onboard and create their own value from slicing and dicing and interpreting the raw data themselves. But what actually ends up happening is alongside that, the company ends up scaling their service verticals and employing talent to make sense of the data on people’s behalf. 

What does the balance look like for you right now? How much is what I would call service and how much is platform?

So I’m not going to buck the trend, I’m afraid. We are still people heavy and I love people and I think people are absolutely essential for interpreting information, whatever that information might be. I also think the industries that we serve, the kind of the culture, creativity, taste is very, very important. I sometimes talk about design being the differentiator because that runs through everything that we’re doing because ultimately, people are designing and creating products off the back of the insight and information that we deliver. 

So to answer your question, the vast majority of what we’re doing is on creating the information and delivering it in a format that works for our end users and that a lot of the time is a report forecast. But we also have a large customer success team who are there to help interpret it. And we’ve got consultants that sit alongside that. 

And a lot of our clients will, as part of their subscription, have access to our analysts or our directors so that they can spend time with them to help that interpretation to ensure it’s relevant to not just their industry, but their consumer that they’re selling to as well.

Okay, Now, WGSN bills itself as the global authority on change, which is a really good elevator pitch at any point in time. It’s a super interesting one now because it feels like we’re forever at the zenith or the peak of change and that every new year that goes by is a new version. It’s just a heightened accelerated version of what’s come before. And if everyone is constantly saying, no, no, no, wait, no, no, no, this is the moment of peak transformation.

I can’t tell if that solidifies your offer or challenges it. So I’m going to explain a little bit what I mean. If change is everywhere all the time, it feels like outpacing it, running to get ahead of it into that 18 month sweet spot at some point becomes a bit of a kind of Sisyphean task. Like, you’ve no longer come back from reporting on the future than the future is here and you have to do it again. And you keep having to set new benchmarks for how quickly you can translate, interpret and educate on what’s coming because it arrives faster than ever. 

How do you think about that? Because change being a constant is a very cliché thing to say. And on the one hand, I could easily go, well, it is. And obviously that translates into more demand for WGSN services. But it also feels on the other hand, like maybe at some point you go, doing this faster and bigger has to stop making sense at some point. And the smarter play is to sort of kind of step out of the current and offer a bit of a different perspective.

Okay, so I’ve probably got multiple different answers to that question, but let me take the last thing you’ve said and kind of come back to you on that. Our job isn’t to ensure that every single brand and every business around the world is ahead because sometimes being the first to market is not the place that you want to be because your consumer might not be that early innovator. They might be more of a kind of conservative consumer or a mass market consumer. 

So what we need to do is ensure that not only do you know what’s coming, but you know the right time for you to jump on board. And sometimes it is better to watch and wait and let others test and try things beforehand. So I don’t think it’s about being the fastest and biggest. I think it’s about being really intentional and practical about when you chime with those movements. So I think that’s one part of it. 

I would also play devil’s advocate on, yes, and if you hear me on stage, I will talk about changes everywhere and we’re living in a poly crisis and all of those things are true. But there are also things that haven’t moved particularly fast. So AI is here now and it is changing everything. But really, the last big technical or technological innovation that changed everything was the iPhone. And that was a long time ago. Yes, there’s been, you know, tinkering around the edges and things have got a bit more advanced, but really fundamental, mass step forward. We haven’t had anything since the iPhone and now we have got AI, right? So that is huge and we are all grappling with that. And I know we can talk more about it, but know that there’s positives and negatives with that. 

So I think that yes, change is everywhere, but it’s not to the point that it should become overwhelming if you’re being handheld through that. And again, different industries, different kinds of consumers, different changes will be relevant to those industries or those consumers.

I think intentional is a great word to use there. That’s a very good answer. The reason I booked this interview with you, desirable thing to do in the first place, but also you and I both attended an event in February, which was at THG Studios, so formerly The Hut Group here in Manchester. I was in the audience that time, you were on stage. And during the panel discussion, you said something that stuck with me and I’ve been thinking about since, which was the difference between a trend and a fad. And I don’t think it necessarily chimed with the theme the event was trying to capture there, which was fun to me. I always enjoy something that kind of bucks the main thrust of a session. 

Hahaha

The idea, though, that was being put forward there was that instant gratification, circle the world in an instant, the whole user generated content, high variety, high velocity, reactive product creation, that all gives rise to a lot of transient fads, like passing crazes. And the real art of forecasting is maybe picking the signal from the noise and having the taste, cultural grounding and the industry experience to separate those things from actual trends. 

What I wanted to ask you about was what’s the matrix and the method that you use to make the distinction between what’s going to endure and what’s going to burn out? What’s the hallmark of a lasting trend as opposed to a bit of a momentary madness?

Okay, so first of all, thank you. You’ve just described literally what WGSN is here to do. Spot those signals of change and help people understand where they should be. I will also say at the event, I had a couple of my team in the audience and they were giggling after us because they said I practically wrestled the microphone out of one of the other panelists because I totally disagreed with what was being said. I’m not afraid to say unpopular things. 

Look, so our methodology, we have a trademark methodology framework called STEPIC. And we look at society, technology, politics, industry, the environment, and culture and creativity. And those Cs are really, really important because they speak to the human aspect of all of this. This again is about, we call them consumers, but it’s about human beings. And human beings are smart. They make conscious decisions. They make those conscious decisions as a reflection of what’s going on in the world around them. And so we have to look at all of those different aspects. 

So everything goes through this very rigorous methodology and we use our experts to spot those very early signals of change. But because we’ve been doing this for so many years, we’ve also got very sophisticated algorithms behind the scenes, which we can then use to work out the longevity or the volume of those trends. And we are constantly regression testing all of those forecasts to perfect the longevity and the volume because it is just as important to understand when a trend or a movement is waning and when it’s ending as it is to understand when it’s coming because people need to back out of that. 

But to come to the first point there, I think in a social media driven world, those fads, they come and go really, really fast. And again, coming back to consumers being kind of sophisticated sentient beings. You know, that’s just noise now and it might get amplified because it makes a good headline in a newspaper or on a website somewhere. But they come and go and that’s not where brands should be investing their yen, pounds, euros, dollars, whatever it should be. They need to be investing in things that have longevity that consumers do care about or need, you know, because a lot of this is about need states as well. 

And if we think about nutrition, if we think about health, if we think about the fact that we need to live in homes that keep us dry and warm, and we need to wear clothes that keep us dry and warm or keep the sun out, those are environmental factors that impact what we’re gonna buy and what we’re gonna put in our homes. And so that framework is the kind of foundation to what we do. And then it’s feeding in those data points to give that kind of pinpoint accuracy that makes it really specific to the brands that we’re talking to.

Okay, all right, good framework. 

Now, you have a strong background in media and content. So I suspect you’ll have been thinking about the AI era of the web and what that’s heralding for publishers the same way I have. I mean, I’m a bit more on the ground as a publisher these days than you are, but I’m keen to see whether we’ve reached any of the same conclusions. So The Interline, as anyone listening to this will know, is a free to read publication with a transparent and supported business model. We’ve been open about the fact that AI, we’re not seeing a massive pullback in organic traffic yet, although we are seeing an uptick in AI referrals, which I will define as traffic that comes from ChetGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini, from a most noticeable point of view. 

But we’re also observing what’s happening outside our walls, and there’s a massive spike in synthetic content and a shortfall in organic traffic across a lot of other publishers. And that’s coinciding with a bit of a big change in the commercial conditions for publishing human created content. It’s becoming less profitable to run a lot of the websites that we think of as media institutions and authorities. 

Now, if I understand correctly, one of WGSN’s sort of three macro data sources, I think specific to your AI plus data product, but maybe more broadly, is media. The other two being institutions and NGOs, non-governmental organisations.

In a real sense, if it stops making sense for authoritative media sources to publish their own analysis and the volume of the kind of AI sloppy stuff, the synthetic self-reinforcing content is rising, it seems like that’s a threat to one of the pillars that forecasting sits on. What’s your perspective on that whole side of things, on what I’m tentatively going to call the ersatz, the fake era of the web?

So I’m old enough to have lived through the first version of this when the World Wide Web became a publishing platform. In fact, I was a very early digital journalist and set up lots of different websites that were not competition in the main part, complementary to the print version of it. And it was of doom and gloom. There will never be any print publications. And actually, if you look now, the ones that are still with us, are ones who they still have got that authority. It’s the big news brands that are still here and they are thriving in many instances. 

So I take that as optimistic input that media will survive this. It will cut some of the noise out. It will cut some of the media brands out because to your point, they won’t be able to afford to continue going. But, you know, in my HuffPost days, we thought everyone would demand free information and now look at the number of people who pay for new subscriptions, myself included, because I want to hear from sources that I trust. And again, in this day and age, there’s a lot out there which we can’t trust. And I believe in humans and our sort of sense of self and our sense of fairness and equity that we will want to hear from proper journalists in the future. So I think I’m less worried than it sounds like you might be.

That doesn’t mean media brands can be complacent, but you’re going to have to show real rigor in your reporting to survive this. And yeah, there probably will be fewer organisations pumping this out. 

But on the AI search side of it, the other great thing, I saw a brilliant slide at a presentation at a conference last October, and it was actually showing the traffic that is now going to what we would have seen as sort of the more old school news brands, the authoritative ones because the LLMs were crediting them far higher than they were free sources. So, something like the Guardian’s traffic had gone up hugely since the increase in people using ChatGPT to search for what’s going on in the world. 

So I feel that it’s a change and these changes do come around, you know, every couple of decades, but it kind of forces everyone to up their game. And that’s no bad thing.

No, and I am with you. The part I worry about is less of our own business forecasting, let’s just use the word, less of our own kind of projecting forward where we go from here because our organic traffic continues to rise as well. So we’re not a casualty of this in any way. I think what I’m concerned about is the glut of empty information. 

Yes, the slop.

That’s the thing that concerns me. And I think the reason it concerns me is I see a trend on the part of readers in general, not ours necessarily, but readers across the web, and LinkedIn is a nexus for this kind of stuff, of people not exactly relying on their critical faculties the way that they would have done before. Maybe this is just a new version of the whole like, web is here and that’s going to just erode trust in institutions and authority won’t matter. 

I mean, I am actually a firm believer in the idea that we write human generated content in its long form and we trust people to read it and form their own opinions. I think the part that concerns me is the outlook for the level of trust that people place in things and how much they spread it around.

Yeah, I get all these things. We’re about to publish a white paper called The Sentient Consumer, which is very much about how consumers are reacting to the AI age. And that when everything becomes so polished and everything becomes generic, that we will rely far more on our other senses. So things like touch, smell, what we hear, those things become more important and we will rely on those as well. 

So I think actually what it’s going to come down to is, whether you’re a media organisation or you’re a company creating product, that you can create an emotional connection by appealing to or pinpointing different emotional states that we’ve got and different senses. And I think if I was running a media organisation now, I would probably fall back on some of those things that I used to in the past, which was, you know, does this story make someone’s face move? That’s why I always used to have posts. Will they smile? Will they cry? Will they gasp? How are we going to break through the monotony of their day and give them something that really forces them to think or gives them great joy and entertains them? And none of those things have changed. We still want to be entertained. We still want to learn. There is a lot of slop out there and cutting through that is a challenge, but there was a lot of slop on the World Wide Web as it was, right?

Very true. Yep.

So I think it also gives an opportunity for new voices. You know, I don’t want to read something which was auto-generated by AI. I really don’t. Laura Jackson posted something on Instagram recently. Like, I actually want some typos. I want some grammatical mistakes because then I know a human’s done it. You know, we use Gmail and now the Gemini auto-correct is on my email. I fundamentally disagree with quite a lot of the things that it tries to auto-generate.

Yeah, you and me both. It kind of pushes everything towards the statistical average of language, which is not very interesting. 

Yeah, it’s dull. It’s dull.

It is very dull, I’ll give you that. And I think maybe I’ll give an optimistic kind of angle at the end of that would be, I think I’m undervaluing people’s ability to distinguish human authored from non. And I think people seek that kind of joy and they’ll find it in the right place, it’s long term.

Now, we just talked about inauthenticity where AI created writing for the web is concerned, like the sloppy set of things. But to me, there’s another major source of inauthenticity, which is the business model behind user generated content and social/influencer content. For product forecasting, I know WGSN tracks, I think, in excess of 100,000 posts a month across different platforms to detect what you call social signals. I’m interested to see how you account for or exclude the volume of social content that falls into the “brand deals” bucket. 

And I think TikTok is maybe the prime culprit here, to my mind. It’s not the only one, you know, ostensibly a free platform for self-expression. Anybody can use it for anything they want to make videos. In practice, it’s kind of turned into QVC with unpaid hosts and people who monetise their audience through referrals. You see the same on Instagram, but maybe less. And I’m not condemning anyone’s hustle. People can go make their money, make their money where they find. But it feels to me like there’s an unspoken issue, which is we place a lot of weight in fashion on influencer and individually created content nowadays. 

Now we’ve seen a kind of taste making devolve a little bit from the big institutions. And people tend to think that if they see something that comes from a person on TikTok or Instagram, it’s going to be closer to the bone than what they would have seen from institutional media. But in a lot of cases, there’s a big brand partner pulling the strings behind the scenes and shaping the narrative. Do you see that happening? And how do you kind of, what foils do you have against it?

So let me give you an in real life example of how we cut through it, even though we’re talking about digital, but I think it will hopefully resonate. So we send our forecasters and photographers to festivals around the world because that is a really good indicator of emerging trends. We do not photograph the people in the VIP areas because in the VIP areas, they’re all being paid to wear what they’re wearing. We’re interested in what the real people are wearing. We’re interested in what the real people have, you know, put on their lips and eyes. We’re interested in what they’re eating. You know, what’s the longest queue at the food truck? You know, what are people kind of cobbled together to create an outfit from for Coachella or Glastonbury or whatever that might be. We don’t want what’s in the VIP area. 

And we use a sort of similar kind of ethos when we’re coming to social media. So we have influencer maps, but not influencer in the kind of way that people would think of the Kardashians as influencers. I’m not really interested in what they’re wearing. I’m interested, let’s come to beauty, in the makeup artists, in the product creators. There will be some brands there which are really good at getting in early on trends. And we’re again, constantly updating those influencer maps so that we can spot the right signals, so that we can give proper forecasts on that. And we are not just showing what people who’ve been paid the most amount of money are posting because if they’re at that stage, that product has been in production for years already and it is money that’s shooting it up the algorithm. 

So we have a, you know, again, a kind of science. There is a very strict, well edited and well honed methodology to ensure that we are giving the right information. I will say that there are lots of brands that do just want to see everything that’s showing up about their brand or the trends that they have decided to put into production. And so we do need to be able to show that as well, but we will keep on bringing it back to, our job here is to tell you what’s coming next. And these maps mean that we can do that in a really accurate way. 

And if you want to see how people are, you know, utilising your product, sure, we’ve got data feeds for that, but ultimately this is about you really connecting with tomorrow’s consumer and the products that they actually want rather than just what someone with 2 million followers has been paid to post about.

Good answer. 

I want to get on to how you’re using AI in your own operations, which you hinted at in a minute, but I want to quiz you on your recommendations for brands in what I think the 2028 edition of your Future Consumer Report is calling the “AI ordinary era”. So, if content, as we’ve just kind of talked about, to me at least feels a little bit under threat, a little bit compromised at the integrity level, maybe a bit throwaway, how should fashion brands be thinking about ways to forge and maintain connections with customers? You talked about the different senses that just walk me through what you would see as the recommendations for brands in this AI.

So I’m going to sound old fashioned right now, but it’s about getting humans together. so, brick and mortar is back. We’re seeing a resurgence in malls in the U.S. People want to go and spend time with people and lots of the spaces that we did that with have disappeared. You know, here in the UK, pub culture is kind of declining as pubs are closing, nightclubs are closing. And so consumers are looking around and saying, well, I still want to socialise. I still want to get together with friends and family. Where are the spaces that I can do that? So, you know, front and centre to fashion brands and not just fashion brands, we’re saying, how do you collect people? How do you create spaces where people want to be together? That can be brand activations, that can be in store. That can be around sporting events, around festivals, around music concerts, those kinds of things.

Because, again, those events, those places make people feel something. And if your brand is showing up there, and I really hate the word authentic, but I’m going to use it here deliberately. If you are showing up in an authentic way, that feels really good. Look at the rise in popularity of run clubs. People love running and they like running with other people. And if I can do that with Hoka or Nike or something like that, and they’re going to make it safe for me as a woman to run in the streets of London at night, fantastic. And music’s pumping and those kinds of things. I feel really good and now I’ve got a more positive brand association with you and maybe I’ll think about buying my trainers from you next time around. 

So it is, you know, the experience economy, you know, that’s old fashioned now. You know, we forecast that many, many years ago, but it’s getting another go around right now. And we actually launched an entire events and culture platform last year, which we gave to all of our clients to really hammer this message home, which are the events which you can activate around. That’s not necessarily sponsorship. In fact, in the large part, that isn’t sponsorship. It’s just thinking about what a consumer is going to be feeling, what are they going to be doing around this time, and how do you work to be part of the enablement of that.

Well, good answer. 

I want to put one other thing from your 2028 report, which is the idea of ‘keepers’. So a cohort of shoppers who have – I’m paraphrasing here – like a long-term horizon and who make their buying decisions based on kind of life stages and transitions rather than temporary changes. These people are obviously good targets for the kind of brands that deal in premium, durable, timeless products and companies that have repair programs and so on. If you’re a luxury company that deals in perennial styles, great, this is already in your wheelhouse. 

I think it’s also indicative of a shift in the general relationship, though, between brands and consumers, probably one related to what you’ve just talked about, like bringing people together. And I think it’s somehow tied up in the idea that in the always-on algorithmic attention economy, that’s delivering diminishing returns for basically everybody taking part in it. Everyone is just sort of glancing off one another. No one’s really forging lasting relationships. 

So I feel like there’s a bigger change happening maybe where brands should be thinking about long term business rather than new business and customer retention more than customer acquisition. To me it feels like there’s a difference between a brand actively courting my attention, like jumping up and down about me, me, me, and one that just deserves it. And that feels like something that’s going to be expressed as much in product and assortment strategies as it is in communications.

Yeah. Yeah.

Tell me a bit more about the whole keepers thing. Am I reading too much into it or do I have that right?

No, you’re not at all. So we create these cohorts, we forecast them every single year, two years out. And obviously we don’t fall asleep on the 31st December and wake up on the 1st of January as a totally different person, so they evolve over time. And they are not based on demographics. So this isn’t about age or gender or where in the world you might live. It’s very much on psychographics. So again, we’ve talked a lot today about human emotions and feelings and things like that. And that’s what kind of ties lots of these groups together.

And the ‘keepers’ are, they’re looking for more meaning in a world that often feels quite meaningless. And they do want lasting relationships and they are intentional, again, I’ve used that word already today, but very intentional about the purchases that they make. Now, part of that is because money is tight for a lot of people and that throwaway culture isn’t helping people’s wallets. So this group isn’t necessarily just about luxury. It isn’t necessarily just about people who are concerned about sustainability. A lot of this does come back to, well, I’ve only got this amount of money, so this item I’m going to buy is going to need to last for me. 

And you see this with the kind of younger demographics who are buying products and then reselling on Depop or whatever that might be, whichever platform they choose, because they might still want newness in their wardrobes, totally understandable, but they’re going to need to replenish their financial supplies to do that.

So if you just look at the projections on those resell websites, it’s higher than traditional retail at the moment. And if you want to create a lasting relationship, you need to make sure your products are gonna last long enough for that person to buy, wear, and resell. And if that’s a positive experience, then they’re likely to come back and do it again. And I look at a brand like Stussy, that my husband wore throughout his younger years, and then he passed on those Stussy t-shirts to the kids. He still wears Stussy despite the fact he’s 52. And the boys have treasured those, but they have also now bought into that brand. So that brand has created literally a lifelong relationship that is now jumping from generation to generation. And that’s what you need to do if you want to still be here in the future. 

So the keepers are a really, really important cohort. And you’ve got to think of them, there’s the sustainability angle, which is great, but there is also that they’re thinking with their wallets and how much disposable income they have got to, you know, hand over and they want something meaningful in return.

Yes. And there’s an old Terry Pratchett analogy about boots. I forget which book it is in, but the principle behind it is you can buy something cheap or you can be forced for economic reasons to keep buying something cheap and having it break down and then rebuy it again. Or you can have the luxury to buy something better and more durable and more timeless. And I think an increasing number of people are choosing that rather than being drawn into the cyclical throwaway cycle. 

Yeah, completely agree.

For your own operations now, how are you using AI today and how do you see the partnership between human taste and machine insight evolving? So here at The Interline, we’ve got our third big AI report due out in a few months. And I know this whole kind of division of labour question is going to be top of mind for a lot of listeners. We have people in design, development, sourcing, top level retail CEO and so on. And I think across the board there, across that spectrum of roles, there’s a lot of different people who maybe feel that they’re destined to become curators for machine insight and machine output rather than creators in their own right. 

So I look at this in how can I unleash my brilliant human beings to do what they are brilliant at, and what are the jobs that they’re stuck doing that get in the way of that unleashing, if that’s a word. And so we will use it where we can to pull forecasts together. And by that, I mean getting the images and the words on a page that can be published. The actual creation of that forecast is going through that methodology, which I’ve talked about. But is there a way that means that what’s in their brains gets onto the page in a quicker, more efficient way? Fantastic. We’ll use AI for that. When we’re gathering feedback and information from our clients, we’re increasingly using AI for that. But the conversations are still happening between humans. We’re just recording it and then using AI to synthesise that. So when I’m thinking about my product prioritisation, I can then run that through the AI models. So, you know, did three clients ask for this or did 3,000? Because I prefer to be doing the thing that 3,000 need. 

So we’re using AI really, really tactically to make us faster and more efficient. But that means that that human power, that human time can then be spent doing things they’re brilliant at, which is the research, and then working out the application of those forecasts to make it more relevant, more accurate for the clients at the end of the day.

Okay, I think that’s a really good answer. Very similar to the way we use AI. Obviously, we’re in a different side of the business to you folks, but our goal is not to use it to put things down on the page in terms of writing. Our goal is to say, what do people know? We trade in expertise. Where does the expertise lie? How do we maximise the amount of expertise that somebody can share? And how do we put that expertise in the right places for people to read it? That’s kind of our framing.

Yeah, last summer we launched Pulse, which is our own GenAI search on the platform, which is only trained on our data and our information. And that is so that our clients can kind of get in and get out even more quickly and get right to the nub of the problem that they’ve got. So, you know, I’m a brand in this market creating for this consumer, creating these kinds of products. What are the trends that I need to know about for… you know, six months, 12 months, 18 months, whatever that might be. And it will now go through all of our forecasts, all of our images, all of our data, and give them the information they need in a really synthesized manner. And that’s working really, really well. 

So for me, that’s, you know, the humans are still creating the forecasts. We’re using the data to do the longevity of those trends, but then we’re then using AI to ensure that it’s all packaged up really neatly and nicely for the specific single user who’s coming onto the platform.

And is that specific single user potentially a new person as well? Because one of the things that I think about when you think about AI surfaces like that, were different ways of people using natural language and semantics to interact with big reservoirs of information, is that it starts to bring in people who might not have been direct users or direct customers of yours before.

Yeah, I think so. You know, our typical user is either working in marketing or product creation or buying merchandising or strategy. C-Suite probably didn’t have enough time to dive deep into all of that information. Now with one prompt, they can get exactly what they want. So I think it’s also ensuring that, you know, people who are very, very time poor now can maximise the analysis that they get from WGSN.

And I think in our AI report, we’re going to be diving into how we’ve reached the level where that sort of use case is trustworthy now and the level of trust that people put in those things.

Yeah. And that’s why, you know, ours is only trained on our information because I want to make sure that they can absolutely trust the decisions that they’re going to make off the back of it. We talk a lot about decision success. That’s our promise. You use our information, you get decision success. That’s what you’re coming to us for.

Okay, well, think that’s something we’re to come back to maybe a little later in the year. 

Final question from me today, Carla, is every fashion company wants to set itself up culturally, operationally, and technologically to be able to make better decisions, to be able to get decision success. What’s the most common way that you see that desire being wrongly expressed or poorly put into practice? Rather than the kind of like, what advice would you give? I want to try and flip this a little bit and say, people clearly want to make better choices, companies clearly want to bring the best products that they can to market. Have you ever seen companies internalise that the wrong way, operationalise it in the wrong way?

I think maybe greenwashing is kind of one of the best examples of that, which is brands have been told by us, sustainability is very important and you saw lots of people putting, you know, a sticker on it. Whereas that wasn’t fundamentally how their business was set up. So I think that you need to really, really know what you’re good at and play into that and not do a knee jerk reaction and try to be like somebody else. 

And some of those things take time, you know, let’s return to where we kicked this off. If you are just chasing, chasing, chasing fad after fad, you’re going to be unsuccessful. You need to be putting your time, your money, your investment, your resources into things that have lasting impact and consumers will reward you for that. So think really intentionally about which of those areas you are, because it’s very difficult to tick all of those boxes at exactly the same time. You want to be culturally relevant, you want to be technologically relevant, etc etc – you know, pick one, do it really, really well. I kind of feel like I want to give that advice to lots of governments at the moment. Pick something, pick it and do it rather than sort of spread everything really thinly because then nobody wins.

Well, we’ll have to book a separate politics-focused recording and maybe launch a second podcast about that. I have some things to say about politics, now is not the time and this is not the forum. 

Ha ha!

For now though, Carla, I’ve enjoyed this conversation a lot. It’s given me some insights. I very much appreciate your time. Thanks for joining.

Thank you so much, Ben. It’s been fantastic. I really enjoyed the conversation.

And that’s the end of my conversation with Carla. Maybe she and I will make good on that idea of launching a politics podcast, but for now I hope you got some real insights out of that discussion. The idea I’m going to be taking away is intentionality. And that reminder that just because the world went and got itself in “a big damn hurry”, to quote the Shawshank Redemption, doesn’t mean that your brand has to jump into the churn. I think that’s a salient idea to take into not just product and collection planning, but the way you think about technology adoption. 

A very different topic is coming up next week, so thanks for listening and I’m going to speak to you again really soon.

Ben is a senior fashion technology storyteller, analyst, and moderator with more than a decade's experience in retail.