Ahoj,
this is the first edition of my newsletter in English.
I’ve been posting in Czech for over a decade now - started with Tumblr musings (as every Gen Y kid), continued on SquareSpace and now I’m on Substack (as every Gen Y adult).
I’ve been dreaming about writing in English since I graduated from English and American Studies at university, but nothing really pushed me in that direction. But when Amit and Mathias approached me almost a year ago, if I wanted to do a TEDx, I promised myself that by the time the recording was out, it would be live. And that's today.
Soon, you’ll find a deep dive into trends and startups here - the same type of content I share (and will continue sharing) in Czech - but for today, it’s the script of the talk I crafted for that TEDx talk.
Take care,
Pavlina
PS: Ahoj is Hello in Czech.
Do you take your coffee with alternative milk? Almost everyone, right?
Did you take your coffee with alternative milk let's say ten years ago? Not so many…
Still In 2014 trend forecasting agency WGSN released a report saying plant based milk will take over the world. In 2017 that Oatly is that one brand to watch.
And they were 100 % right. Between 2018 and 2022 sales of oat milk grew by 25 times. And last year, Oatly sold oat milk for 195 million dollars.
In the last few years trend forecasting agencies predicted that we will have homes full of plants (check), that we will become obsessed with yoga (check), listen to KPop (check), ditch heels for sneakers (check) and consider having a AI boyfriend (check).
No wonder that 2014 report WGSN claimed they can predict the future seven years ahead with 95 % certainty.
I remember when I first discovered the world of trend forecasters about ten years ago. I called my brother and said: There are people who are able to predict the future. Ten years ahead! They know what we will be wearing, eating or what would make us excited.
I blabbered into the phone as if I discovered unicorns exist. And they did. People who saw something none of us could see.
Since then I studied trend forecasting as intensely as I could. So let me tell you a story, how it's possible that someone knows what will happen in the future.
What was the first thing you did when you entered this room? You looked around. You looked at the setting, the people, their clothes, their facial expressions. You overheard their conversations, peeked into their iPhone screens, into their bags. You smelled their perfumes (or the lack of it), what they had for lunch.
What you were doing is called Kuki wo Yomu. It is a Japanese term for reading the room. Picking up signals.
As a trend forecaster you're constantly doing Kuki wo Yomu. Because by reading the room you are able not only to guess who to ask out for a date, but to predict the future.
When you start really seeing the world as a one big room, you start seeing patterns. You see them in social listening, Google trends, stock prices, IPO filings, during tastemaker observations, scenarios, environmental scanning, and backcasting.
And on those patterns you can build the forecasts.
Once you see the pattern, it's time to hop on it.
Trend forecasting is like surfing. You're not creating waves, you're only spotting them. Kuki wo yomu gives you the ability to see them and understand when to stand up on board to hit the wave and ride it.
The best companies in the world are those who understand surfing.
Few years ago Netflix saw that the gaming market is 8 times bigger than Hollywood. And is making more money than movies and music combined. They understood that an average gamer is a 35 year old who earns decent money. 48 % of gamers are women. And above all, more that 3,5 billion people in the world play video games.
So the TV series Witcher was born. It was inspired by the popular video game series and fantasy books. Its first season has become among the top10 most successful series Netflix has ever produced. 76 million people globally watched at least part of it in the first month after its launch.
For the past few years it was a perfect world. Trend forecasting agencies were releasing expensive reports, huge companies were acting on them, and consumers were shopping like crazy.
It was a perfect world until it wasn't.
Even though we have the most advanced tools that we've ever had, in the last three years it has become more difficult to read any room than ever before.
Why?
We produce more content than ever and we consume it much faster. In her time, Audrey Hepburn made two movies a year, each one lasted 2 hours. Nowadays a TikTok influencer Victoria Paris creates 22 000 videos a year with an average length of 32 seconds.
An average person consumes so much content a day as if you read 100 000 words. Which would mean reading one Tolkien's LOTR book a day. No wonder we need to be connected to our screens 11 hours a day to be able to consume all of that.
Talking about screens: We used to share one screen, now an average household has 11 connected devices.
So instead of reading one big room, we see millions of rooms changing at a really fast pace.
Therefore describing a shared global room has become an almost impossible task.
If we don't share rooms, we don't share patterns.
If we don't share patterns, then we don't share trends.
If we don't share trends, then we have lost a shared culture.
Ever heard of Bad Bunny? No? He's the most listened to artist for the third year in a row. Beyonce can barely make it to the top 10.
Ever heard of SheIn? The Chinese fast fashion retailer is the most popular brand in 113 countries in the world. Nike in 10 of them.
How come something can be so popular and still so unknown to us?
Algorithms locked us in our own rooms.
GenZ is the last generation that we can describe. All the generations afterwards have lost the possibility to create their shared language, idols, stories.
I grew up in the nineties. Everyone back then loved Britney Spears, low rise jeans and Leonardo di Caprio in Titanic.
Everyone except me. I was not the cool kid, but a nerd, who wore thick glasses, played video games, quoted Hermann Hesse and spent weekends in the forest. I felt really lonely, like I couldn't connect. It seemed everyone shared a language and I didn't.
Last week I met a fifteen year old girl who reminded me of myself back in the day. We started talking and I asked her very carefully if she has any friends.
Tons!, she smiled. And showed me Discord servers, whatsapp groups, where she discussed the latest developments in Final Fantasy, BTS and Dungeons and Dragons. I smiled back.
I went back to all the predictions about the fact that we have lost a shared language. And I realized that on the surface, we are all in different rooms. Each of us on their own.
But in the past few years, thanks to the internet, we have gained access to hallways, elevators, and parks where we can meet like minded people. Where we can be together with people who understand us.
The fact that mass market trends are slowly disappearing is the best thing that could have happened to us. It created space for everyone to find what suits them the best. Their favorite place in the house.
And for us as trend forecasters it created the best brief possible. How to predict and create the future that includes everyone. Not just the cool kids.
So, coming back to How do you predict the future? It should be: How do you predict the future that includes us all?
Kuki wo yomu gives you the possibility to see the room. Witness what everyone's wearing, listen to their conversations. Pick up the signals.
But it's not enough for today's world.
In order to understand the hallways between the rooms just looking from the outside is not enough. You need to start talking. Enter other people's rooms and invite them over to yours. Pick signals that are not visible at first sight, go deeper, go further, go outside your usual.
You'll soon discover that we live in a world where there is not one kind of milk to put in your coffee. And that some people drink tea.
And I think it's beautiful.