Searching For the Next Big Thing
Tom Julian has seen the future and it’s walking into the Traffic store on Sunset Plaza.
This is what it looks like: a short-sleeved top with rainbow-colored cartoons. It’s on a slender blond shopper who’s idly thumbing through racks of edgy women’s wear--only today she has a witness. Julian is scrutinizing this creature of the times and making mental notes.
“Between the computer animation, the cartoon prints and the Information Age, see how that’s reiterating information?” he asks. “How visual can we become? Information. Computers. Well, our clothes are becoming that too.”
The future is Julian’s business. As a trend researcher for Fallon McElligott, a Minneapolis ad agency, he hits the streets, the clubs and the stores to get a jump on what the rest of us will be wearing when fashion dives into the mainstream.
Julian, 33, is among a new breed of trend forecasters who’ve sprung up in the past few years as the fashion food chain has shifted into reverse. More than a dozen firms, mainly in California and New York, specialize in searching out the Next Big Thing where they live as well as in trend capitals like Tokyo and Berlin. Gone are the days when those with the will to be chic had to be slaves of fashion. Now the positions are swapped.
“The culture has become more consumer-driven as opposed to market-driven,” says Suzi Chauvel, president of Pop*Eye Chauvel, a Laguna Beach trend research firm. “Consumers are saying, ‘I know what I want and I won’t automatically buy what you shove down my throat,’ and this has changed the way products are designed, developed and marketed.”
Ergo, the manufacturing mountain is going to Muhammad. And with the growing importance of the streets, clothing, shoe, soft drink and car companies need people to prowl them. Some manufacturers rely on the rising tide of trend research firms to do their legwork for them.
“Kids are very fickle and a lot of the top brands know that, and they know they’re riding a wave and it could change overnight if the kids decide it’s not a cool brand,” says Ruth Davis, global product director for Reebok Classic, the Stoughton, Mass.-based company’s line of casual footwear. “That’s why companies like Reebok have to really do our homework.”
Chauvel says she got the idea to launch her 5-year-old firm specializing in trendsters under 30 while working as an executive at Ocean Pacific, the Irvine surf- and snowboard-wear company.
“I used to meet with licensees, and every time I would fly to a company, I would hear the same lament from big-time executives, saying, ‘I’m out of touch. I feel like I’m losing my edge. I don’t know what’s going on with youth culture anymore because I’m always in meetings.’ ”
Chauvel calls her scouts “pulsars,” because “they’ve got to have their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in popular culture.” She works with 33 part-time pulsars, ages 12 to 80, who live from L.A. to Tokyo and typically work in other fast-changing fields as well, from art to sports. Armed with video equipment, pulsars recently investigated Jamaican ska culture at the Alligator Lounge and surf society on the dawn shores of Huntington Beach.
In the view of their fans, pulsars and their counterparts one-up those darlings of ‘80s marketing--focus groups--which are unlikely to attract people living on the edge.
“People think of youth culture as being wildly innovative, but only about 15% or 20% of the population is experimental,” says Christopher Ireland, a principal of Cheskin+Masten / Imagenet, a research company in Redwood Shores, Calif. “They don’t go to malls. They don’t go to sporting events, so it’s very difficult to find them.”
What’s more, say some trend analysts, people are less honest in the artificial focus group setting, giving rise to the new scouts.
“It’s a backlash from the whole corporate, mega-science complicated kind of research,” says Janine Misdom, a partner in Sputnik Inc., a 2 1/2-year-old market research firm in New York. “It’s the evolution of a grass-roots approach. It’s a mid-’90s thing.”
So scouts for Cheskin+Masten / Imagenet followed groupies at Lollapolooza, the alternative rock tour, last year. They also monitored the Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park last summer, then issued a report for a private high-tech client. The team of scouts, all in their 20s, blended in with the audience, noting sightings of blue nail polish, magenta hair, T-shirts with iron-on decals of “cheesy ‘80s weekly shows” and baggy jeans “showing off boxer shorts and ‘butt cracks.’ ”
*
Not all embryonic trends reach full term, however. Julian spotted L.A. men, mostly members of rock ‘n’ roll bands, in skirts in the spring of ’94. But the fashion statement, which he included in his “Menswear Report” that goes to Fallon McElligott clients and other subscribers around the country, never developed.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of functionality in it for men,” Julian says. “There’s not that acceptance.
“I remember when [New York designer] Michael Kors did a men’s bodysuit. I said, ‘Think about it. A guy is accustomed to getting his shirts laundered. And he won’t feel comfortable having his underwear and shirt tied together.’ It becomes window dressing. It becomes buzzy. It becomes hype.”
On a recent day in Los Angeles, Julian cruises down Sunset Plaza, checks out the crowd at Fred Segal Melrose and strolls through Erewhon.
Erewhon? What would a natural foods supermarket have to do with fashion?
“I do think there is spillover,” says Julian, in L.A. incognito-wear, a navy Donna Karan suit and white T-shirt. “I’m looking at marketing. I’m looking at visuals. I’m looking at interesting product lines. Are they getting into other things than just food?
“Retail is retail, but there are all different forms of it. Think of the movie theaters now that have everything from serve-yourself candy to gourmet coffees. Are they going to be selling ‘101 Dalmatians’ stuff there? Maybe. But again,” he says, walking into the sprawling supermarket, “this is part of California culture, California personality.”
Julian swings by the juice bar and the baked goods, taking particular note of the rugalach. “Individual packaging. Not tens of cookies, but OK, five cookies.”
Passing a bookcase filled with tomes on alternative health, Julian sees other possibilities for inedibles. “If these kinds of stores did clothes, is it organic clothing? Is it hemp? And if so, would it be unisex?”
Businesses that want to stay ahead of the curve find trend research crucial. Buyers include companies as diverse as PepsiCo Inc., Limited Express and BMW.
*
Some architects of hip, including Irvine-based Mossimo Giannulli, say they don’t use them. “The whole idea of Mossimo is they don’t need a trend analyst because they’re living the trend everyone is following,” says spokeswoman Janet Orsi.
But Chauvel numbers big-name clothing and product designers among her clients. “They’re certainly some of the sharpest business people around and they’re smart enough to know they can’t be everywhere at once,” she says.
Street-cruising trend scouts are among the tools Reebok uses to keep tabs on increasingly diverse groups of young people.
“You have the urban hip-hop consumer,” Davis says, “and you have your more alternative kid--West Coast, Seattle, a little grunge but now more computer-influenced.
“I have a bunch of different sources because I can’t be everywhere all the time. I prefer going with niche operations like Sputnik that focus on consumers who are very much the cutting edge.”
Davis studies the Sputnik videos and reports and holds brainstorming sessions with Sputnik researchers and Reebok designers. Then either the designers or Davis herself retire to the drafting table to come up with next year’s styles.
Take spring’s new Heritage Reebok Classic Freestyle shoes. In English, that’s Reebok’s original women’s aerobics shoes in pale pastel nubuck suede with the kind of chunky platform soles found on snowboard boots.
The style reflects the urban taste for wearing snow sports on one’s sleeve, favored by “kids [who] have never gone skiing, trust me,” Davis says.
Sputnik collaborated by suggesting materials and colors based on last year’s projection that girls’ snowboarding would mushroom.
Sometimes, the cutting edge is too sharp for the mainstream. So manufacturers try to soften it. Reebok liked the iridescent material found on firefighters’ jackets and alternative kids wear. But when designers applied it to shoes, they used only palatable bits in the logo and sold “boatloads,” Davis says.
Cone Denim, which supplies fabric to Levi’s and the Gap, among others, forecast the current trend toward stiff, dark indigo jeans, often worn cuffed, partly with the help of a Pop*Eye video shot in Tokyo a year ago.
“They were taking their rigid jeans and cuffing them up 8 inches over there,” says Ken Girouard, marketing manager for the Greensboro, N.C.-based manufacturer. “They love Americana, the James Dean look. We have a new product out that mimics the rigid look but has a soft hand. Next spring, it’ll be happening more and more.”
Some trend scouts prefer working with video because it lends a three-dimensional flavor to information about lifestyles. Chauvel says that when she started her company five years ago, she recognized the limitations of still photos. “They were static. They were people posing.
“I was aching to get at the underlying stuff, and I felt by using a video camera, you could get at the body language and the sound and the movements, the sort of conversational eddies going on behind the scenes, the music in the background and what was being drunk. I thought it’s the wave of the future. It’s got to be video.”
On the other hand, using video cameras can be tricky for researchers trying to blend in with their quarry. Says Chauvel: “It’s invaluable, but it’s also a pain. . . . It’s very technically difficult. You have to have your sound, your lighting, permission a lot of times. And a lot of times a video camera is looked upon with great suspicion. I’ve been thrown out of more clubs than I care to count.”
Scouts also find other visual mediums useful. Many keep their hand in cyberspace. And Julian watches TV shows and films that may start trends. At the moment, his prey includes the ABC series “Relativity.”
“It’s like a chain reaction,” Julian says. “It could be something from the street that goes through the campus that shows up on the runway that shows up on the big screen.
“Is there a true formula? No. But I think there’s always a way to be ahead of the curve, and that’s by having a perspective. That’s by having a history as well. You have to know where trends are coming from and where they might go.”
