The fashion trends have disrupted the fashion industry to a large extend. As the concept of trend forecasting, a few things have a significant impact on the fashion industry. The ability of trend forecasting in fashion, technology, and culture is the critical area of the marketing industries dedicated to identifying consumer behavior patterns and helping the firm and brands connect with the audience.
What are fashion trends?
Fashion trends are famous styles of clothing and other accessories at a particular moment in time. Fashion trend influences the popularity and scale of patterned fabrics and the proportions of the garments they are aimed at.
Who is a trend forecaster?
A trend forecaster is the one who aims at identifying the new trends and predicts how those trends will shape the particular industry. The trend forecaster’s responsibility includes analyzing the consumer’s data and recommendations based on those insights. Forecaster travel to different and cities to find out the new trends and try to bring some new ideas about the brand.
They are forecasting the ideas requires scientific skills and creative concepts. Thus, fashion forecasting is the area in the fashion industry that is concerned with predicting upcoming fashion trends, colors, design techniques, textile materials, and many more that brings consumer demand. Fashion forecasters produce trend reports that product developers use to create new clothing and accessories for brands.
What skills should a fashion trend forecaster possess?
Some skills are required for fashion trend forecasters:
a. Creativity
Forecasting the trend requires a creative mind. It would be best if you thought out of the box when trying to do something big in the future.
b. Analyzing skills
Analyzing things about the trend is the most crucial role. While analyzing, it makes you sure that you are in a correct and successful position.
c. Knowledge about other industries
A trend forecaster should know the other industries, about what are they up to. This skill also has an essential part to play while forecasting. You must keep an eye on them and try to find out the trends they currently show. Check the news and social media.
How fashion brands forecast trends
Some of the ways how fashion brands forecast trends:
a. With the prediction of internal trends
Big fast fashion brands are often vertically integrated, which means that trend prediction is made within the company. It allows fashion forecasters to work directly with product development teams to create new products.
b. With a trend forecasting agency
Large, non-vertically integrated brands often turn to the expertise of trend forecasting agencies, which produce trend research reports for a fee.
c. Go to fashion shows
Before the advent of the internet, trend forecasters did most of their research into fashion shows, noticing the most promising looks, then transferring this information from the platform to the product developers of chain stores and fashion magazines like Vogue. It is called a “top-down” prediction, and it relates to the way fashion trends flow from high fashion runways to high street stores.
d. Watching out celebrities
The crowd covets celebrities and follows their every move, sticking to all their words. The fact that celebrities are so influential is why huge companies turn to them as spokespeople for their brands and products.
e. Researching influencers
Today, trend forecasters are more likely to look to influencers, street style, and bloggers for information on the latest trends. It is called “bottom-up” forecasting, and it involves closely monitoring the target market to forecast the demand for future trends.
f. By looking at other industries
Young freelance fashion designers may completely turn away from forecasting trends altogether and instead create mood paintings that draw on art, movies, and nature to inspire their unique collections.
Conclusion
The world of fashion is so vast, stepping into this industry requires some skills and creativity. If you have the skills, then you can surely make outstanding outcomes. Predicting fashion and trends today is an organized process, and it goes beyond intuition and the game of guessing. Forecast helps provide farsightedness and prepares retailers and designers to trendy stock clothes for their customers increasing its importance in the apparel industry and retail business.
Fashion forecasting helps remove clouds from ever-changing trends and patterns and provides a seamless growth journey for retailers by forecasting potential trends. Forecasting is not complicated as it seems all you need to do is correct analyzing and predictions for this. This article has explained what kind of skills and ways you need to adopt to make something big in the future.
