Episode 104: Trendspotting with Futurist Vicki Ostrom from SanMar

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Be constantly and consistently looking at a number of images. Don't even worry about what you're trying to find. Just look at things. You're going to start seeing consistencies of messages over and over, and you will be able to figure out what the trends are without even trying.

Hi friends, I'm Bobby Lee here, the Chief Content Officer at Common Skew, and I've always wanted to talk about trends and fashion-forward merchandising on Skew. You, Cass, because wearables alone comprise easily over 35% of the industry's $24 billion in sales. And we need to learn how to train our minds and eyes to be better trend spotters for our clients, not only for our clients, but also for our own branding and marketing. Younger buyers are bringing a heightened awareness and expectation for trends into the corporate world. And in this episode, I'm joined by futurist and trend editor Vicki Ostrom from Sandmarc, a specialist in identifying societal trends and translating them into profitable products. With 20 years in the fashion industry, Vicki has designed for companies such as Eddie Bauer, Tommy Bahama, and JCPenney. Penny. In this episode, we talk about how to build more creative awareness, how to capitalize on color trends, how to use imagery to tell a story, and a lot more. Each month we average just under 5,000 listens to SkewCast, and we can't tell you how grateful we are for so many of you who join us each week as we explore the ideas that help change the way we think. But we want to help more. So here's how. We'd love to know about a specific challenge you're facing in your business. We're starting a new series inside the SkewCast called simply Ask Us Anything. It can be related to commissions, sales, marketing, messaging. It can be business business or even personal. No topic is off the table. If you'd like to ask a question, email me, bobby@commonsq.com. And you know, we're very passionate here about helping you grow your business, and we have multiple events coming up designed to do just that. CommonQ Sessions is a multi-city event held in Dallas, LA, Chicago, and New York. We even have folks flying in from other areas just to attend the industry's only one-day conference dedicated to sales growth. You can learn more at commonsqsessions.com. Also, we just released the schedule and session details for SKU Camp held at the Ace Hotel in Pittsburgh. Check out skucamp.com for more details. And finally, this episode is brought to you by CommerceHQ, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. You can begin your free trial now at commercehq.com. And now on to my conversation with Vicki Ostrom from Sandmarc. How do you stay on top of trends?

I am an omnivore for when it comes to information, and I think that's really really the key. I'm looking at newspapers, I'm looking at blogs, I'm looking at the art world. I look at millions of magazines all the time and all different kinds of blogs. I mean, architecture, technology, travel, you know, home interiors, virtual merchandising.

Yeah, that's interesting to me, by the way, how much of that— how much of the non-fashion type Yeah, stuff that you are— process is informing your work.

I think I get as much— I get more actually out of the business section, the food section, the science section from the New York Times as I do the style section. Yeah, I take this app called Texture, which is a digital online magazine app where you can— I mean, I think it's like $15 a month and you have access to So many kinds of magazines, just like over, I don't even know how many there are, 200 magazines or something, titles. And so I just skiffed through a bunch of them and I was looking to see which ones I really look at the most. And honestly, Vogue and W are my least read ones. I do look at them, but I get more out of, you know, Adweek and Bon Appétit and Esquire and Wired and Afar and glamour, you know.

So you're a trends editor for a billion-dollar company plus. Are there resources that we can use that you know of that are go-to resources? It could be 2 or 3 that would help us as we are trying to stay on top of trends. Or is it like what you just said? Is it more you just learning to be a creative connoisseur of everything, or do you have resources that you know for sure, um, a distributor could use?

I think there's a lot of things that you can access with out having subscriptions or that cost you very little that are so helpful. I definitely would absolutely get the Texture app because it is, you know, literally like $15 a month. And just having access to the variety of magazines that you can get through there, and you can look at archives as well. So if you think, oh, you know, there was something back in October in Self magazine that I, I remember, you can just go back to it and look at it. But just having Having that variety, you could honestly just take that and do a bunch of trending looking at that because I look at Backpacker, I look at Fortune, I look at Fast Company, I look at Billboard for music, I look at Self magazine for health and wellness, I look at Teen Vogue, I look at Esquire for menswear, Bon Appetit for what's happening in the food world, I look at Wired for technology. It just goes on and on and on. You know, 2 hours every week looking at as many of those magazines as you could possibly look at, you're gonna start to see similar thoughts going on between different magazine writers.

So you're making connections to patterns.

Exactly.

Not only patterns of thought, patterns of color, patterns of style.

Yes, I mean, it's all kinds of levels. I mean, I look at some of these magazines, I look at for— because I think they do graphics really well, and I like to see what kinds of things that people are using to tell visual stories. Some of them, it's more about content. But like, I noticed last summer especially, so many of the business magazines were full of stories about the Gen Z group and generation. And, you know, Meet Your New Bosses was the title of one of the— I can't remember if it was Wired or one of those magazines that had more about business. Might have been Adweek, actually. So that was like, I'm like, okay, you know, they're looking— business people are looking to the Gen Z generation as business gurus. Like, they're literally your new MBA that you can, you know, learn from them. And then color— everything was about color. Every image was colorful to a maximal degree. So, you know, I'm picking up things on a lot of levels when I look through these.

Yeah, so I, I love that, um, because I guess when you get a definitive resource that is supposed to be the de facto resource for trends or fashion, then what you're getting is one opinion. Exactly. Instead, what you're doing is you're becoming a curious omnivore, processing as much as possible, because a lot of the creative process really is about making connections. Many creative people who have studied creativity all come to the same conclusion that it's about making connections, and it's putting in the hard work of doing that kind of research as opposed to finding what you think is an easy answer.

Exactly. And I think that's a really awesome statement about it because we do take a really amazing trend service called WGSN. It's Worth Global Style Network. They're a digital online trend service that started in about 2000. They're really one of the largest that exist today and they cover all the trade shows around the world having to to do with beauty, fabrics, trims, styles, all that, you know. And so I do look at those because I can't go to all those trade shows, and I do want to know, you know, what's, what's going on there. So that is valuable. And then they have some visionary reports as well going out, you know, what's the consumer for, you know, 2021 wanting. And those are— they are very good things to know about and, you know, have as cues. And then when I do put— when I go back and look at all the magazines and, you know, blogs and things and the newspaper. Yes, it does help me having that lens that I look through, through these big visionary ideas to come back to magazine and see. Then I can see more trends more clearly. But honestly, having all those resources, I still— even if I didn't have WGSN, I could pick up so much just from magazines and from the news, the New York Times.

You know, I have the suspicion that, that resellers, distributors, your clients today, those that can close this gap between the consumer desires and trends and their B2B buyer or their business buyer, can win and win big. Particularly those that can use things like your research to become a creative consultant to their customers. And the streetwear is a great example, just being able to spot and see that trend and knowing that you need to be sourcing those types of things for your clients. How have clients used your research?

It's really a variety of ways, which is super gratifying to me because I feel like the information that I put in my trend reports is not just about clothing styling. It's really— I am trying to express to the people that I'm, you know, presenting to what's going on visually because we are such a visual world right now. Everything is interfaced through some digital device, and so we are seeing more and more of these visual storytelling methods becoming so important to all of us. So in my, my work of my presentations, I'm putting every page together that I'm presenting to you as my audience in a way that mimics what I'm seeing happening in the magazines, in the blogs, in the newspapers, to show you how it might be done. And that's something that I've seen customers, or they've told me that that's been helpful. They're like, oh, okay, this is you know, how I could construct, even if it's just pages for their own social media, which is so important. You know, a lot of times your own website for your brand is pretty set and you may have really tight brand guidelines that would take a while to switch out. You know, if you said today, oh my gosh, you know, we've got to use so much more color than we're using right now on our webpage. You know, you're not just going to be able to do that tomorrow, but you could do it in your social media. You know, maybe you're trying it out and exploring some ideas through some images that you're going to put into your Instagram or on your Facebook or something like that. So it's kind of a way you can test things out. So I've seen people use my pages of my trend report as inspiration toward that end.

Yeah, you do a tremendous amount of research and I was blown away by the documents that I had pored through. How does that research inform your buying decisions at Sandmarc?

You know, it's really a circular loop here, which is the best part of it. I try to, you know, everybody's so busy in their own individual parts of their jobs, you know, so finding, for me too, it's just like everyone at their own businesses, finding ways that you can share out this information to your own teams so that everybody can benefit from this research that I'm doing, because no one has time to do this, not even in, you know, my own company as well. So I do, you know, present this in turn, my presentations internally as well, and I sit in on our merchandising groups, you know, design process times, and am able to interject various, you know, research components that I have found. So for me, so you're an influencer, an influencer or internally, I guess, in your own company, right? Yeah.

Okay.

So my role would be more on the front end of— because I am on the merchandising team, that's where I sit within my company. And so that's where the product development happens. So I'm a part of that side of things to, you know, help guide through those bigger visionary ideas that I'm seeing, because that's really where product design, you know, needs to be informed.

Yeah, it has to be incredibly difficult to— I mean, SanMar's product serves so many major corporations. There are a lot of the same colors with some of these companies, and, and yet there's this balance that you have with seeing trends that are coming. It has to be incredibly difficult to know that you're sourcing things that you know will sell and have sold for years, or they've been on a very strong streak, and then also to be able to take risks and gambles on trends that you see coming Is that the kind of conversation you have all the time in the merchandising team? What does that sound like? What do you guys wrestle with when it comes to the things that you know are the staples and that will sell all the time versus the things that you want to take a risk on? Is there an allocation for a certain amount of spend for that? What's that conversation like?

Yeah, it is. This is an age-old question for every company. I come from the retail world before being in this channel. It's always this, this struggle between the buying group and the designers because the designers, of course, are like, but I see this color coming, you've got to get in on it. And they're like, but I've sold this many red and it's this particular color and I need to make sure I can make that spend back again, you know? And so it's, you know, it is a struggle. And when you add in the complications of this world where much of what we sell is something that's logoed by a brand or by a team And they have very specific colors, and it doesn't matter if lavender is the new purple, you know, if royal purple is your purple. So that makes it challenging to have, you know, a lot of sway in, you know, that this is the new color that you have to buy into in this world. However, we even in the promotional products industry are being challenged by the public to bring more more retail color into this world because everybody wants to look like what they see in retail. And so we are adding a lot more pastel, for example, into our deliveries because pastels are coming into the office space. Even though that isn't something we have done in the past, we're starting to bring it in more because we're actually adding more women's product, women-centric product, like blouses and things we didn't used to do that, you know. So now that, that kind of product wants to have a, a pastel color. So it's always a conversation.

I have seen this gap close in the industry where fashion forward, or the designs that you buy and love and wear as a consumer, coming to your company then, and then buying apparel for your company or on behalf of your company— I've seen that gap close in, in the industry over, and it keeps closing and closing faster. Used to be there was like two distinct worlds in corporate apparel, was corporate apparel, and you could tell versus what was going on in, in fashions and trends. But now this gap, are you seeing that too, and is it closing even faster now?

Definitely, yes. I mean, the, you know, and here you go with trend, many millennials and Gen Z, you know, they are needing to be wooed into corporate America. And one of the ways that you want want to do that is making sure that they're comfortable and happy in the setting that you're providing. And part of that is they want to feel good in what they're wearing. They want what they're wearing to represent who they are. And so just saying, this is a polo, it is our standard uniform, you're going to wear it and be happy, isn't going to work because they'll be like, well, I don't really want to do that, so I'm going to go to this other company. So more and more, you are seeing companies providing more of a kit kind of process where they'll pick out 3 or 4 items that are a variety of knits and wovens that maybe will fit better on different body types. And then just giving them a certain amount of money, your employees a certain amount of money to spend on any of those items because they're already a prescribed set that you can feel comfortable with.

Yeah, giving them more options and giving the variety and individualizing. We know that, we know that the millennials have brought in this passion for, you know, individualizing the experience.

Yeah.

You've done a tremendous amount of research, and I kind of get into some of this. One of the quotes from your research was, for fashion players, 2019 will be a year of awakening. Can you explain that?

Well, it's really interesting. You know, I, in my trend report this year, I, I was I was putting all this information together and I was like, wow, this is so, so important. I know all of these things are important to talk about because I've seen them over and over and over. So I know I need to talk about them because it's happening. But some of the things I was like, I'm not sure I understand why they're happening. I just know that they are happening. And so I just kept researching and I found some information on the economy. And again, you know, it's just about looking for things. So this was a report from Deloitte Insights, and it's a free white paper that I was able to get through their website. And it was about the economy, essentially, and what the economy meant to our retail world. And, you know, all these questions that everybody's having about like, why are all the retail stores closing? And, you know, what does it mean? And so through that, I was able to realize that there's so much going on right now with kind of the haves and have-nots in our world. And so many people in America right now are just having kind of just barely enough to get by financially since the Great Recession. We're more or less out of the Great Recession now that started in 2007, but everything isn't the same anymore. So many of those— core things that we have to pay for like housing and healthcare and education are more expensive now. So we are having a lot more trouble keeping up with just those basic needs that we have to pay for. So when it comes to the things that people can spend for any kind of non-discretionary items that most of us in our world have to offer people, it's very challenging to get their dollars. And so when you're thinking about how do you do that, you have to get a lot more creative now. So you're seeing companies, you know, you could look at it as a really doomsday time for retail, but actually this report from Deloitte Insights came to the conclusion after they did a lot of analyzing of financial numbers and statistics of the, you know, retail federation from both the United States and globally as well, as well, they came to this result that actually it could be a renaissance for a lot of businesses, but you have to dig deeper. And the word nuanced is, is a word that I've been coming across in a lot of different kinds of publications, anywhere from the New York Times to, you know, Vogue magazine. You see the word nuanced, and that's where we're at with business. You have to understand your customer on such a granular level now. To really reach them. You have to be creative. And so I have this theory that I go through with my trending and it's, I think if this is happening, then that is the result. So for example, if the economy is what it is and we're finding that basically 80% of America is having trouble having enough discretionary income to spend on things that I have to sell them, then I have to figure out where is everyone shopping. So what they found through this white paper by Deloitte Insights, they found that 52% of high-income earners were more likely to shop online and 44% of low-income earners were more likely to shop in-store than a high-income earner. So depending on what I have to sell, and you know, within Sandmar, I may have both of those kinds of products. I may have a product that that is very, very, very cost-conscious and then I may have something that's more expensive within my industry. So maybe I want to choose where I'm going to sell that product. Maybe I want to get it into brick-and-mortar stores if it's a really basic thing that's more on the low-income side of things is going to buy. So that's an interesting observation. The other thing about that that I thought was really interesting about understanding the economy part of it is that things are challenging out out there, not only just financially for people, but also emotionally. I mean, we are having a lot of questions coming up daily in the news about, you know, global warming and what's happening with that and different conflicts around the world and politics. And it's just a lot coming at us. And now we have all these different ways that we're getting our information. So there's this barrage between, you know, television and social media apps that are bringing this news to us. So there's this business concept right now called kindness is your new KPI. It's your new key performance indicator, and this is being written up in business journals. Literally, you know, kindness is— kindness is a new KPI. So what that means is this concept of a small happiness, and when you drill down even deeper, you look at what is a small happiness. It's something that you can afford that makes you happy. So one of those things is candy. And so candy is actually trending right now really high. You see candy being used in a lot of different kinds of media that has, you know, a product you're selling has nothing to do with candy. My favorite example is there was a— and I can't remember if it was Self right now or Teen Vogue, but they were doing an article about beauty products. So it was different lotions and, you know, shampoos and things that they were telling you, you know, were important. And they wanted to show you how much to use of each one. And so they had a little dollop, you know, on the page of whatever this beauty product was. And to show you the proportion, they put a piece of candy next to it that you would recognize, like a Skittles or a Lifesaver, you know. And, you know, so even there you're seeing, you know, candy being used. I opened up the New York Times on the other side of the spectrum 2 weeks ago and Harry Winston had a full-page ad and it's called Discover the Harry Winston Candy Collection and it's their luxury rings and the page is a pale pastel pink and they have 2 big jars of candy sitting on the page. So it doesn't matter what you're selling, you can use candy now because it's that small happiness idea.

I love the idea of a small happiness. It's funny, I am a word nerd so I noticed etymologies and neologisms and how we use them. And the term self-care has become ubiquitous. And I would guess that would constitute as a small happiness as well.

Oh, completely. Exactly. And you're looking at, for example, millennials. Millennials are not being compensated for their careers as they would hope to be for all the educational debt that they have. So, they are having trouble doing all the things they want to do in life. So, they're being very thrifty about how they proceed. And one thing they're doing is they're doing a lot of things at home. They're 70— let's see, 75% of millennials prefer working remotely. You know, even just talking about 75% of millennials prefer working remotely is one of the statistics that I found. And, you know, so you see businesses taking note of that and bringing into the home different things that you used to do outside of the home, like on Pinterest on Pinterest, the searches were up for home spa decor by 269% in 2017. So now there's fashion brands that actually have never existed before, and they're selling this new kind of clothing called inactive wear. Like, there's this thing called the home coat, which is basically somewhere between a robe and a jacket. It's $295 or $550 for a pack of 2 because you might be working from home and have a friend working with you in your kitchen and that's your new coworking space. All these different ways of bringing your life into your home is making life easier for this cohort of millennials who may have started out by working from home because there wasn't a job necessarily to go to. To when the economy was not as recovered as it is now. But now they're like, "Well, you know what? I kind of like it at home. It's cheaper and I love to have my friends over." So these small happinesses that you can bring to people to make their home life better is something a lot of brands are responding to.

Can you tell us the difference between macro trends and micro trends?

To me, a macro trend is something as big as the economy. It's a social movement like— I always like to use the example of when bike shares were just coming up in cities and you were seeing a lot more people commuting on bicycles that were the rent, you know, rented shared programs. Suddenly people were actually coming to work sweaty more. So And then we responded in our branding to, you know, offer performance wear that was color-coded more for the office rather than for sport. And then a microtrend is, to me, when I'm looking at festival wear, for example, and I look at South by Southwest and I want to see, you know, what are all the women wearing to South by Southwest? In regards to a festival look. But when you look at that, there you're gonna find probably 5 different segments within that grouping. So those are all micro trends. They may not be, you know, all over Forever 21 or in Macy's or something like that, but within that particular festival, that was a micro trend of a look that was popular.

Yeah. Getting into a topic we both love, a part of your presentation was about story and advertising. You said in the presentation, advertising is about me telling you a story. Ralph Lauren and Tory Burch both said the same thing. They both said they're not in the fashion business, but they're in the storytelling business. You said that advertising is about me telling you a story, whether it uses words or visuals. A brand is hoping to take you on a journey through storytelling. The visual stories fall into three distinct styles: hyper-real, connective, and never-ending. Can you elaborate?

Yeah, this is really interesting. I mean, again, just looking at a lot of visuals, I started seeing some common threads, and those were the three that really came out to me the most. Connective is one that is, I think, really popular in that it uses a lot of nostalgia and, you know, kind of getting at a retro vibe or something using ephemera, things that you can connect with like a coffee cup or a Pop-Tart or, you know, or it's a hand-drawn visual a lot of times. So you can see the human hand behind it. And that's a really important part of it. It's got an authenticity to it because you can see who made it, right? Kind of idea. So that's one kind of visual storytelling. But really, just to pause for one second, the thing about all three of them is that they all have a collage element to them. Because we are looking at things so quickly online and you may not get someone to look more than a millisecond at what you have to show them. So you're seeing a lot of brands taking this concept of showing you a collage so that they can get a lot of visuals in all at once and how they're doing that is the differences. So this connective one, you may put a number of those nostalgic items all together and one of them is probably gonna be going to be interesting to me, you know. Yeah. Um, the other one is hyperreal, which is probably the most complex of them all and maybe the more futuristic, you know. Maybe it isn't as common, but that's where you're making a puzzle out of the pictures. So you're not just presenting a coffee cup, a kitty cat, and a Pop-Tart, you know. You're taking those 3 images and you're cutting them up like it's a jigsaw puzzle and putting them together in such a way that maybe you're messing with the proportion a little bit, or just connecting them in ways that aren't natural. But it's not so complicated that I get frustrated by looking at it. It's just complicated enough that I'm like, oh my gosh, what am I looking at here? And you're dissecting it visually, you know, so it's like a puzzle. And then the last one is never-ending. And this makes so much sense because, you know, we're used to looking at tweets, which are, you know, daily and moment by moment. You're watching TV shows in material kind of way now. So you're seeing the same thing visually, you're seeing one image, the same image repeated 3 times right in front of you. It's like a film strip or a comic strip. We're seeing a lot of superhero movies where it's like, here's a series of stories one after another. And so that idea of the image repeating and looping is, or spliced, you know, a splice, the same image spliced and then also maybe repeated 3 times, you know, so that's a common way that people are communicating with you as well.

Okay. Can we talk about color for a moment? What color trends should we be aware of today? How do we utilize color trends better in our businesses? And I don't mean necessarily just merchandising. Talking to you sort of makes me feel like I need to be be as a marketer, as a salesperson, maybe as the CEO of my company, kind of more aware of color trends than I am for all kinds of reasons. Because of maybe we're creating a lookbook for our brand, maybe we've got a new Instagram campaign we're about to roll out. What's trending and why should we pay attention to it?

This is so important. I, you know, because we are in an industry, like I said before, where we sell product that is going to be logoed. The logo has a certain color that is immutable. So I I have to be sensitive of what I'm presenting to you. So I do sell a lot of white. I sell a lot of black. I sell a lot of grays, versions of grays. Those are not bright colors, and yet I'm seeing bright color in every media out there right now. And the reason is because color is emotional. Color can grab your attention and make you look at something. And we are in a heightened state of emotion right now in our society as well. Color is very attractive. So even though I, in my own business of what I'm trying to sell you, what my numbers are behind are the neutral colors, I can still use color in my advertising, in my marketing to you because I know color matters to people. So I'm gonna show my— like I made an example on one of my trend pages of product that I perceived my millennial customer would like that was a little bit more streetwear-oriented and then moving also into a casual office space. So I put those items in white, black, gray on my models, and I have those models on the page, but I have an orange ground behind them. So because I know orange is a color that's really, really important to both the Gen Z and millennial age groups because it's part of the Stop Don't Shoot movement that is really an important topic to especially high schoolers. So even though they may not even be actively participating in it, it's becoming a trend to be supportive of it by wearing this color. I mean, I've, I've seen a blog just the other day that was like, look at the new surprising color for swimsuits this season, and they had 30 different swimsuits suits and they were all orange. So it's not even just, you know, t-shirts and hoodies and things, but orange is a very important color. So I put that orange, bright saturated orange color behind my neutral products that I know sell for me because I want you to at least be attracted enough to come in to my particular business to buy those pieces from me. Yeah, yeah, because I'm telling you, I get you by you seeing orange.

Right, right.

You know, color is a cultural construct.

And yeah, I love that statement.

Yeah, this was a statement by a really well-known color historian named Michael Pastoureau, and I hope I'm saying his name right. He's written a number of books on color, and like, he'll have a color— a book just about black and the history of the color black from when it was first incepted, you know, and then blue. So I mean, He, he's very learned on it, but he said color is a cultural construct. It's society that gives color its meaning. And that right now is just so true. We've seen colors shift as to what it means for each generation. And that in our business is important to pay attention to. And again, just what I was saying before, I may not have a bright fuchsia pink that I'm going to sell, but I may want I want to put that in an ad campaign because I know it's such an important— hyper brights in general are important, and that particular bright shade of pink is part of the women's empowerment movement. And so we've seen that be an important color, so I may want to include it in my media.

Yeah, I love that. I love how we're talking about color trends as they don't apply to apparel necessarily. I all the points you're making about that because it's a very emotional experience, color is.

It is very emotional.

Yeah.

And the other color that's emotional, and it goes back to this small happiness idea, is yellow. We struggle with yellow in our Sandmar business because yellow actually doesn't sell that well for us. But it is such an important color in retail right now. And so we do need to pay attention to it. Yellow is a happy color. A color that we can all see very well, actually. You know, when you're talking about how your eyes actually perceive color, yellow is one of the easiest colors that everyone can see well, and it's happy. So where we are all struggling with some of these heavy news issues that are out there, people are literally wearing yellow as an armor. You know, they're, they're saying, look, I don't feel good about things today, but I want to be happy. And so they're wearing yellow to make themselves happy, to make their friends friends happy. They're taking selfies all the time. They're being put into other photos. They want to be portraying this optimistic vision of the world that they would like to see, and so they're wearing yellow.

Do you have advice for distributors? Instagram has obviously become very ubiquitous for sharing visual stories. And what have you learned about Instagram as it applies to trends and storytelling, anything you've, you've discovered that has surprised you in all of your research?

You know, the thing that sticks out to me the most is the thing about influencers. And there's been a lot of information stories that I've— seminars I've sat in on Instagram or on influencers this year. And an influencer is someone on Instagram particularly who has basically shared their life with their followers. And they may have— like, a lot of influencers are people who maybe they started out just wanting to show you particularly what fashions they liked and how they styled them. But then as more and more people started following them, the followers are like, well, I really love how she puts what she wears together, and I'd like to know what does she eat, you know, and where does she live, you know. If she has a baby, I want to know what kind of baby stroller she uses because I really like this person, you know. There's this intimacy that you have when you see someone on a daily basis in their natural habitat, you know, and you feel like you know them. And so there's an authenticity that they portray to you that you feel like you can believe. And the way that a lot of influencers show you who they are is very, what's the word? It's not complicated, it's not highly polished. There is an, uh, an authentic quality that they made it. So it goes back to that connective storytelling, right? I, I can feel the person, the humanity behind who made this. This was not made by a robot or a computer or an algorithm. I'm not being sold to. So I would really encourage businesses to, when they're making things for their Instagram pages, don't worry about being perfect with everything, you know, really Honestly, being a little bit imperfect is endearing right now, and that takes a lot of pressure off of small businesses. I think I, I would want— I do personally, even, you know, with my own work with me, you know, making things for my blog. I'm like, I wanna— I don't have to fret about having it be the most perfect thing because actually showing some humanity is, is going to be a good Yeah, so good.

Vicki, was there anything else you wanted to discuss before we close?

I would really encourage people just to be open to the world if they want to trend. And it's not an overnight thing.

Yeah, it's like a lifestyle, right?

Yeah, it's a lifestyle. And I would encourage people to not be overwhelmed by the idea that they don't know how to find trends because you really do, but you've got to give yourself time to educate your eye. So if you just start looking at magazines, if you literally only got that Texture app or some kind of a, you know, thing like that where you can be constantly and consistently looking at a number of images, don't even worry about what you're trying to find. Just look at things. You're going to start seeing consistencies of messages over and over, and you will be able to figure out what the trends are without even trying.

Vicki, this has been a great conversation. We, we, um, honestly, I mean it, we could spend another hour talking about this. I think, so listeners don't know, but I sent Vicki questions after reading all her research, and I think I had 15 to 20 questions or more, statements and comments that we could have done this. So let's do this again sometime. I'd love— yes, absolutely. We can make this like an annual visit where you can come and update us on trends.

I would be really honored by that. Yeah, that's great. It's my passion. Thank you for your time.

Vicki, thank you so much. It's been a joy talking to you and have a great day.

All right. You too.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of SKU Cast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.

Mm-hmm.