"Trendalytics Branches Into Beauty, Advises Rule Breaking" — WWD

I co-founded Trendalytics in 2013 because throughout my career in retail, I directly experienced that industry innovation lagged behind changes in consumer expectations. The omnipresence of digital, the on-demand economy and collaborative consumption have fundamentally altered consumer expectations, which continue to evolve at an accelerating pace. Tech startups have changed the way we move (Uber), eat (Seamless), and whether we buy or rent (Rent the Runway).

Newness drives fashion forward, but as an industry fashion has been slow to adopt—and the beauty industry has lagged even further behind. Over the last decades, there have been winners and losers in gaining retail market share. Despite macro retail trends and buzz words, not much has changed within the mindset of most executive teams until now. What's taken retailers so long to evolve to a consumer-centric way of doing business is that they were stymied by inaccessible market level consumer insights. In my keynote at Strata + Hadoop in 2014, I talked about the unique challenges in analyzing unstructured data to surface consumer trends. Now we're leveraging these learnings to share actionable, data-driven insights on the emerging players disrupting the way we do business and which trends consumers adopt and when they fall out of favor.

Fast fashion disrupted production cycles, creating a ripple effect that forced the rest of the industry to completely reevaluate the number of collections, change their distribution models, and move to more consumer-centric timing.

I love this photograph from Vogue's May 1968 issue, imagining the future of beauty almost half a century ago. Where will beauty be in another 50 years?

We are publishing an exclusive report on the state of the beauty industry with CEW and will also be hosting a webinar on the topic on November 10, 2016.

Follow Trendalytics on LinkedIn for updates on these events and report.