Those who are in-the-know have long considered the Maison & Objet trade fair unmissable. The Trend Curve™ agrees. So, when the new edition, which returned to Paris September 9 – 13 was announced, I made plans to represent The Trend Curve team at the fair. In my first trade-fair assignment … [Read more...]
Halloween, Harvest and Christmas Will Still Come
Are fourth-quarter celebrations at risk, given the current Coronavirus crisis? That’s a question I’ve been hearing for the past several weeks. It was top-of-mind as I prepared The Return to Happy Holidays™, my seasonal color and trend forecast for Halloween, Harvest and Christmas assortments. If … [Read more...]
Halloween Trend: Gold Metallic
Move over, orange! There’s a new player in town for Halloween. Gold metallic is one of the freshest emerging color trends for October 31. The idea of swapping orange for gold in your Halloween mix may seem odd at first. After all, Halloween is casual and fun, while gold is considered as a … [Read more...]
Christmas Redux: Letters To Santa
Letters to Santa is a sweet, child-like Christmas theme that The Trend Curve highlighted last in our 2012 color-and-trend forecast, ‘Tis The Season. For 2022, it is making a comeback. In fact, at Christmasworld in Frankfurt and at the Atlanta Gift Market, this theme was just emerging (we posted … [Read more...]
Red or Green, Not Red and Green
When it comes to Christmas, conventional wisdom holds that the most salable color story is red and green. I’m here to tell you that while this may be absolutely true for core products—the bestsellers you repeat with success year-after-year—nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to … [Read more...]
Dots are On-Trend for Christmas
I just finished writing Trend Album™: Christmasworld 2018, The Trend Curve's trend report about the Christmasworld trade fair that runs about 80 pages and includes more than 150 images. Among the noteworthy surface-design trends for Christmas was dots. Dots are trending for Christmas because they … [Read more...]
Lessons Learned from Halloween 2017
Those who create retail assortments rarely get a full view of what happens to products they develop and select at the fateful point of purchase. Which items really made cash registers ring? Which in-store displays actually swayed customers to buy? Not knowing the answers to these questions can feel … [Read more...]
Retail Reconnaissance: Merci Paris
Although the majority of my time is spent looking far into the future, a portion of it is always spent at retail looking at what's happening in the here and now. I believe that retail reconnaissance is absolutely vital to the business of trend. It provides a real-world view of how color, shape, … [Read more...]
Memphis Revival
Embed from Getty Images With this year’s centenary celebration of Ettore Sottsass’s birth, exhibitions and books focused on this artist’s work have made his design sensibility a topic of conversation yet again. At the forefront of recollection is Memphis. This short-lived design movement was … [Read more...]
Maison & Objet – Fall 2017
MAISON & OBJÉT is among the top international home décor trade fairs. One look around the September 2017 edition was enough to see why it's continually at the forefront of color and trend! Pinks were virtually everywhere and rapidly becoming what was being described as the "newest neutral." This … [Read more...]