HOW TO…BE PART OF THE NEXT COOL THING

words Charlotte Lafferty / images Elena Biagi

The future is where we will be spending a lot of our time so know it’s useful to know what we’ll be doing there and the Next Cool Thing talk this morning let us know how we’ll get there.

Maggie Norden, the chair of Creative Media, Martin Raymond, co-founder of the Future Lab, Jaana Jatyri, CEO of trendstop.com and the Evening Standard features writer Camilla Grey outlined the importance and surprising depth of trendspotting, the processes and career opportunities in this rather elusive business. 

The idea of trendspotting revealed itself to be no way near as pretentious as I thought, and it’s not just a french accent stating the colour to be worn in Copenhagen next summer, it’s a real business that all commercial companies rely on. Martin Raymond, co-founder of Futurelab, knows the importance of forecasting, ‘to know where the consumer is going and  then be in front of them’. In short, a team of trend-spotters take photos of what the cool kids are wearing and doing, the emerging trends are then analysed and researched to let the consumer companies know what we’ll be doing in 18 months.

Three things you can do to find the Next Cool Thing:

• Observe - be passionate about observing, notice what’s going on around you. Trendspotting is noticing the anomalies. Writer Camilla Grey hit the nail on the head, ‘two’s a coincidence, three’s a trend.’
• Be Curious - ask questions.
• Don’t Google it- Martin Raymond gets rid of his interns after a week if he finds out they don’t research properly, if you have to Google find something on the tenth page, it’ll show your passion.

And a quote from William Gibson which had the all four trendspotting experts nodding,

‘The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.’