← Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Episode 242: I'm With The Brand (unpacking how brands influence our brains), part four
01:54:32
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A few weeks ago, Dustin and I found ourselves at the mall in the middle of a morning on a Friday. We have a very thrilling life. I needed to try on glasses, and Dustin was there to get a new phone. After a year of carrying like his phone with this external battery pack kind of like permanently attached to it, we, in this household, we will do anything to prolong the lives of our phones, planned obsolescence be damned. But he'd reached the point where the external battery was not now not holding its charge. And he was about to leave on tour. So he finally got a new phone. So there we are at the mall, middle of a morning on a Friday, which I thought the mall would be kind of empty, especially since, you know, malls are supposedly dying. But it was actually a lot busier than I expected. And it was full of teenagers that were like kind of killing time on a super hot day. And then there were families there doing back to school shopping. And while we were there, we took a quick spin around the stores so I could see, you know, what everyone was selling. I mean, that's, that's part of my job, right? And to be honest, everyone was kind of selling the same thing. Like, I could put the products, the product categories into just a few sort of little different bins of types of stuff and aesthetic of stuff. There were a lot of stores that focused on licensed character products like Hot Topic, Box Lunch, Miniso, and lesser known chains, and even some locally owned stores. And I gotta say, I'm saying this as a person with a hello Kitty tattoo, okay? There is too much licensed character product in the world right now. Like, it has to me, lost its luster. And because there is hello Kitty stuff literally everywhere, including the gas station, it's just not as special to me anymore. And I wonder if others are starting to feel this way too. Like, it's just, it's too much and it's been kind of ruined. But so far it's been a cash cow for these stores. So more and more of them are opening and more and more businesses are shifting into carrying, like licensed products. So things with characters and films and television shows and whatnot on it. Okay, so that was that. Then there were all, you know, of course, shoes, selling sneakers and workout clothes, athleisure, you know, that kind of stuff, from Foot Locker to Aerie to Lululemon. And then there were the chains that target a adult professional customer like Loft and J. Jill. I'm pretty sure I'm in the age group where I'm. I'm supposed to want to shop there, but it's not my vibe. And they all sold the same color palette and silhouettes of clothing. Pretty, pretty much look the same. Even their stores look the same. Then there were all of the trendier clothing stores that in theory, target a younger customer. And they all looked the same in terms of the trends they were selling, Whether it was American eagle or garage, Pacsun Sun. Dustin was like, remember when pacsun was a skate surf store? There was Charlotte Russe, Urban Outfitters. Just all of them are kind of basically selling the same Y2K inspired stuff. And in fact, I'll tell you, these brands would surely tell you that their customer base is different than all the others I listed before, and that their brand represents something different that makes them stand out from the crowd. The fact is that even the stores are kind of starting to look the same. Like I told you, Pakistan no longer feels like a cool store at the beach or a skate shop. It's like minimalist in there. Black fixtures, white floors, white walls. That's what a lot of these stores are at this point. Even the stores look the same. The clothes look the same. The logos are the only thing that is different. That's the only thing that lets you, like, tell them apart. And it's funny to go to a pretty decent sized mall. The mall we have here in Lancaster park city is not small. In fact, when I was growing up about 50 miles from here, that was the big fancy mall that we would go to. So it's a big one. Just to walk through there and see store after store essentially looking the same, carrying the same things. We start to wonder, like, how does this happen? We know that fast fashion knocks itself off all the time, but do they take it as far as carrying all the same stuff and making their stores look the same? Well, a lot of this actually comes down to trend forecasting. And more importantly, that most of these brands, okay, really all of these brands are getting their trend forecasting information from the same sources. What does that mean? I mean, you know what the word trend means, and you know what the word forecasting means? It means sort of predicting. Right. So how are these companies predicting trends? Fashion trends, store decor trends, branding trends. How are they predicting all that stuff? Where are they getting that information? Well, they're getting all their informations from the same place, and they're all using that information pretty much in the same process. So I want to explain how trend forecasting is a part of the product development process in the buying offices of brands all around the world. Generally, the product you see in stores got there via collaboration between four teams that execute the product strategy for these brands. First off, you have production. I feel like production are the unsung heroes of all of this that most people who don't work in fashion don't know about. And they, in my opinion, have the hardest part of the job because they are the conduit between the corporate office, factories, fabric mills, freight forwarders, quality assurance in the warehouse, agents, et cetera. They make sure the right thing arrives at the right time at the right price. And making that happen is a whole lot of work. So many emails, so much frustration, so many times where they run a reach your desk. It is a buyer with a piece of paper with different buttons taped to it. And they say, which button? And then they're back an hour later and they're like, which fabric swatch? And so they're always carrying around all these papers with things taped to them, asking you questions and then sending back email and coordinating things and pricing things out. And they sometimes, in my opinion, they have to be like the negative person in the meeting who's like, we're never going to be able to afford that in a meeting of people who are like, oh, I bet we could make it work. The production person is like, well, we can't afford this and we're never going to be able to. And here's why. And that is the job that I really respect. So that's production. Next, there's buying. That's where I've worked my career. That's the team that sort of builds the product assortment, manages the economics of it all, and steers the product strategy. So they're working with production, they're working with design, they're working with planning. Next is planning, who is sort of like the best friend of buying if you're doing it right. Because planning is the team that works really closely with the buying team, analyzing sales, the budget, inventory and profitability. And I would always tell the more junior buyers on my team, your planner should be your best friend. If they're not, get to work on it, because this is a really important partnership. Next is design, and this is the team that you're probably most aware of if you don't work in fashion. This is the team that designs the products both creatively and technically. They work on all the things like fit and details. More and more brands are trying to minimize these teams by having them use midjourney or other AI applications to create designs, which is very depressing. Design works with production on getting everything right. And Design also works with buying. And so we have all these different groups that work together in different regards. Never work together ever, but they work with someone who connects them and everyone's working really hard to do their best job. So now that we know the team of players involved, let's talk about how product development works. Well, it all starts with trend concepts. Often there is a person or a team whose job is entirely putting together these concepts, which will include print direction, colors, fabrics, silhouettes. It will be pretty specific. Sometimes the trend concepts are created by the leadership of the design team, but other times there's someone from the art department handling this. Regardless of who created the trend concept, every product decision, every choice that is made in terms of product that is in the stores or available to purchase on the website during these specific time period that is forecasted by this trend trend presentation, every product will be the result of this trend concept. I would say other than like profitability and sales data, it is the most important driving element in what we are able to purchase as customers. In my experience, there will be two to three trend concepts for every two to three month delivery period, often living in stores and online at the same time. And these concepts will be merchandised individually in the stores. Creating specific sections targeting different customers. Back in part one of this series, I talked a lot about how at Urban Outfitters, we had different brand labels for different kind of concepts and target customers. So we had a boho label, we had a like sort of edgy fashion girl label, we had a more preppy label, we had a more traditionally feminine kind of label. And each of those labels had specific silhouettes, prints and colors that lived underneath them. And what would happen when we would get our trend concepts for the season is these brands would also be assigned to specific concepts. So when you went into an urban outfitter store at that time, time there would generally be like in the women's department, three to four zones as we call them. And each zone would be fully one of these trend concepts. And so it all tie together and present a really strong story of whatever that idea was. You would move through the store, you would move into different sort of sub shops, these zones that had a completely different concept. And then therefore, the brands, the colors, the prints, everything would look different from zone to zone in terms of selling this stuff online. I mean, it all lives on the website together. But there will be individual emails targeting these different concepts. There will be curated pages on the site showing these concepts together. So the team develops these ideas and then they present these to the buying and design teams. Usually it's a whole multimedia presentation. You know, we get like, a booklet and there's PDFs for later. And there might be a film element or at least some sort of, like, slideshow that we're watching. And everybody gets together to learn about this and talk about it. Often there's boards in the front of the room or along the back that have swatches of fabric taped to them and, you know, other color chips and detail swatches and other things that we can look at to kind of get inspiration. And those boards will stay up for the next few months until we move on to the next delivery and the next new concepts. So these get presented to buying and design, and this is before we start planning the next round of deliveries. Like, this is step one is what are the trend concepts? And ideally, over the next couple months, everything that is designed, produced, and bought will fit into one of these trend concepts presented, even if we have to really jam it in there. And we're like, this isn't exactly the aesthetic, but we're gonna do it in the color palette of that concept. And everything needs to be sort of allocated somewhere to one of these concepts. Next buying and planning, we'll do a bunch of analysis of last year's sales and also the sales year to date to figure out the number of styles, colors, and units that should be ordered for this delivery window. And buyers will build a sort of shopping list slash outline for design called a line plan. And this can be as specific as. I need three dresses that retail for 140, and one of them must be a puff sleeve maxi dress based on last year's bestseller. Yeah, it really gets that specific. Or it can be as Vegas. I need four dresses that retail for $89 in three colors. Each design takes this line plan and designs into it. So they're not just, like, pulling ideas out of thin air. They're actually using this sort of outline, this line plan, to reign in what they need to design. And design will try to find that intersection between what the buyer wants on that line plan and what fits into that trend concept. They present these sketches back to the buyers who pick the styles to move forward with. And then those are turned into tech packs. They're sent off to the factories for sampling, and from there they go through the series of revisions and adjustments to hit a price point that I have unpacked in previous episodes. And it's a whole journey. It feels like a really long journey, but somehow it's crammed into, like, six weeks, but it feels Endless. The important takeaway here is that, yes, much of what you see available in stores is dictated by data and sales and pricing and profitability targets. But it all starts as a trend concept and designers and buyers must adhere to this. So even if a designer or a buyer thinks that red holographic fabric would be really cool and interesting to experiment with right now, if that doesn't align with the Y2K boho or neutral minimalism trend concepts, they can't design or buy that. And that's the thing about being a designer or even a buyer in a large corporate environment like this is these ostensibly creative jobs are actually not as creative or at least not as creatively satisfying as it might appear to outsiders, because you really don't get that much say in what you make, what you design, what you buy. It's dictated by all of these other structures, like the trend concepts, like the line plans, like all the financial stuff, like what your boss likes, you know, and so you're really just sort of like connecting the dots that somebody already provides guided to you and maybe you get to color in the picture when you're done, but you're not like just inventing things. You're not really allowed to use all of your creativity to its fullest potential anyway. So knowing all this, that it all starts with this trend concept, that there are all these guardrails in place in terms of what ends up in stores. That's how we arrive at the station called every big brand seems to be selling the same stuff. How? Well, most of these brands. No, really all of these brands, I don't know why I say I'm saying most. This is all of them. They are subscribing to the same fashion trend forecasting platforms. And in most cases it's WGSN. WGSN was founded in 1998 in West London by brothers Julian and Mark Wirth. The name originally stood for Worth Global Style Network. Back then, trend forecast was a different game. Brands in fashion looked to Runway shows for their biggest inspiration. Along with magazines. Trends weren't as fast and furious as they are in the fast fashion slash social media era. So any trend concept curated by a brand would live in stores for an entire season. And many, but not all brands were using a combination of sales analysis, meaning making more of what customers bought most of and sort of this like, like trickle down from the Runway as a means of creating seasonal trend concepts. Moreover, the fact that these trend concepts lived in stores for an entire season meant that they aligned with the Runway seasons too. So it made it just a lot easier. If you're working on this fall's collection that's going to live in the store until the end of December, you just look at the fall Runway shows that came out earlier that year and use that as your jump off. In the late 90s, when WGSN was founded, most trend reporting came from magazines and other physical media. But WGSN broke that mold by initially before the Internet, delivering their trend forecasts via cd. Yes, compact disc. I know that sounds so old timey, but trust me, the CD was pretty groundbreaking at the time. I'm not even sure if most corporate offices could have opened a CD ROM at that point have had to like all gather around on one computer to look at it. Nowadays, WGSN's trend reports come via their website, newsletters and PDFs. Trends themselves are usually socially driven because humans are constantly inspiring one another and sometimes that's a good thing, you know, like shopping, secondhand or voting. And sometimes it's a bad thing, you know, Sunscreen, truthers, MAGA hats. All of us have been living through social, fashion, food and cultural trends our entire lives. Lisa Frank frozen Yogurt, Genco Jeans, SnackWells, Low Rise everything. That era of really long but very tight T shirts. Ooh, let's never do that again please. Bell sleeves, liveauthentic, Avocado toast, Pastel goth, also health goth. The list of trends goes on and on and some stuck around in one or another like fancy reusable water bottles and others feel like a relic. You know, low fat everything for example. But until the era of big trend forecasting, fashion trends, just like social trends, were usually a reflection of what it was like to live at that moment and the anxieties, generational moods and collective desires that came along with it. Celebrities started trends because we desired to be them, at least a little bit. Low fat everything caught on because this society makes body size a priority and crushes us in the process. Very reflective of the times, right? Reusable water bottles are a big business because we're all worrying about plastic. So of course they're a trend that keeps on going. Trends should capture the spirit of a moment. But as big trend forecasting became the roadmap for what is made and sold on a mass scale, it started to feel less like a reflection of a time and the people living during that time and more like a menu of limited choices. If you have gone shopping in the last 15 years and couldn't find anything you liked or found yourself throwing your hands up and Saying listen, I needed a shirt, but all the shirts are off the shoulder. This is right there. That is a big trend forecasting and the problem with it. In 2005, WGSN was purchased by EMAP, now Essential, a business to business publisher and exhibitions company. This meant that WGSN was no longer an independent startup, but part of a publishing conglomerate. And this is when it just starts to really take off in a major way. The appetite for trend forecasting services grew through the 2000s and 2000s for a few reasons. One is the Internet. People were slowly finding it easier to shop outside of their immediate geographical area, which was how we shopped when I was a teenager. You could only get what was near you. And so even though online shopping was new, it was becoming a threat to many of the national and regional chains. And I want you to think about it. Since mass produced clothing had replaced home sewing, most people were kind of limited in terms of what they could buy by what the stores in their area offered. And that meant that brands didn't even really need to make the best or the most interesting stuff because they had a captive audience with little options. And that meant that brands didn't really need to think that hard about fashion trends either because people would just end up buying whatever there was because there was nothing else. The Internet was changing that. Suddenly you could buy clothes from across the country or across the world and you could look until you found something that felt right for you. That was not how it was for all of human history before then. Next, the recession meant that brands became even more worried about buying the wrong thing or missing something important. They were a lot more risk adverse. So the idea of trend forecasting getting ahead of the curve felt like a good investment. It would be money well spent because you would never buy the wrong thing and that would save you money in the long term. Lastly, as we moved into the 2000 and tens and the and fast, fashion was the way of making and selling just about everything on a large scale. Brands had already raced their way to the bottom in terms of pricing, as we've talked about in the past. And the only thing left was to try to be the first to offer a specific trend. Forget about being on trend. You needed to be ahead of the trend. And these trend forecasting companies promised that. Now here's what's interesting. We're going to talk about this more obviously. But brands were buying these trend forecasting subscriptions and really following them to the letter because they were guaranteed to be ahead of the trend. And then in theory, get the trends first and then in theory also you come out ahead of their competitors. The problem was that at some point every retailer was buying the same trend forecasting subscription. And so now they're all on the same calendar, buying the same trends and having them in the store at the same time. How do you compete on that? Well, put a pin in that because we're going to come back to that in 2013 as trend forecasting is just blowing up. WGSN merged with its competitor Style Style Site. And we definitely used Style Site at one of my jobs at the time, this merger was a big deal because it meant that WGSN was the dominant leader in trend forecasting, where it remains today. I tried to dig around and get more information about how many subscribers WGSN has, how much money they make. It is not really readily available, at least not to a point where it felt reliable to me because this is a private company. But what we do know is that WGSN is by far the company doing Trend forecasting in 2025. There are independent trend forecasting agencies out there. There is the Pinterest annual trend report. There are companies like McKinsey that focus on consumer behavior. But WGSN dominates them all when it comes to this behemoth industry of making and selling clothing, shoes and accessories. And now WGSN also forecasts trends in interiors, beauty, food and drink, color, consumer tech, marketing, you name it, they're working on it. Many of my jobs had have had at least one person who handled the work of creating these trend concepts for the brand. In the 2000s, before WGSN was such a player, this person or team scoured street style blogs, fashion magazines, Runway shows, and maybe even went to a presentation by Lee Edelcourt, one of the world's most famous trend forecasters. I had the privilege of attending one of her trend union presentations in LA back in like 2014ish. And it was so cool. It was also, as we say in the biz, highly aspirational. I was working at Nasty Gal then and it was hard for me to see how the trend of artisanal weaving with found fibers would work into fast fashion. Probably would make some like really ugly fast fashion embroidered thing and say it was part of that trend. I don't know. At many of my jobs, buyers were expected to do this trend forecasting work as well, using any spare moment ever to explore what was happening style wise in the outside world. We would literally go on trips where we would just see what was in stores, see what people were wearing. We were expected to follow all the Runway shows, know them, have them memorized. We were expected to follow all the style blogs, all the big influencers, all the other brands, and really know what was happening and what was coming at any given moment. Now, I actually kind of love this part of the job because I am obsessed with analyzing and identifying trends because it involves so much reading and discovery and observation and sort of immersion in the world at large. If you're wondering how trend forecasting works, like how are people predicting the future? I'm going to share this rather lovely essay from Kat Hart of Not Just Another Label in the show Notes because it talks about trend forecasting and the artistry of it at length. It also talks about Lee Edelcourt, who I mentioned earlier. This is a great excerpt from this essay. Hart writes, the role of a forecaster is to analyze the movement of the market, look for patterns in consumer behavior, and find the red thread that unifies a collection of sometimes seemingly disparate ideas that will form the basis of the next big thing. In order to pinpoint a trend, a forecaster must gather and absorb as much information from as many sources as possible and collate it into a coherent, viable story. Taking an interest in all aspects of culture, from the creative arts, media and travel to underground subculture movements and developments in science and technology, is key for any trend spotter. Combined with statistical market research and observation of socioeconomic shifts, these sources also give an insight into what the next emerging trend may be and show the direction and potential reaction of consumer culture. So now you can probably understand why I love working on trend forecasting projects, because I really enjoy a research challenge, following threads and then using my brain to put them all together. And that's the thing about trend forecasting. It is a task that requires a human brain or multiple human brains to do it well. And that means it costs money to pay all of those human brains for their work. In an era where most big brands are scraping off every cent in order to keep profits high while prices are low, that means paying a team or even one person to do the job of all of that research and thinking. Well, it just doesn't fit in the budget. So most brands are just just opting for WGSN and maybe pinging someone on the design or buying team to build out the trend concept presentations basically take what WGSN tells us and just adapt it to our business. The thing about WGSN is it's not cheap. I couldn't find an exact price, but like I said so much about WGSN is kind of hidden, but it seems to be about, about in the neighborhood of $25,000 per year for a subscription, with opportunities to add on features for additional fees. And even with the most deluxe WGSN package, a company is saving money in comparison to paying a salary and benefits for a human to do the job. So they're cutting out that part of it, and they're just doing what WGSN says. And to be fair, WGSN does the work to predict these trends. They do observation using. It's like they're like patented STEPIC methodology. STEPIC is an acronym that stands for society, technology, environment, Politics, industry, and creativity. They're also using data analysis. They're doing a lot of monitoring of social media and the Internet at large. They use a lot of human analysis. I will say that I know nothing about the diversity of the people involved in trend forecasting at wgsn, but it would be interesting to know who is doing this work, because, let's be honest, their own biases and experiences are most definitely being reflected by their output. So if the vast majority of the people doing the human analysis at WGSN are white or come from like an, you know, a more affluent background or are cisgendered or heterosexual or men, you know, whatever, that would color for sure the trends that they are forecasting. Because if they're doing the interpreting of all of these, all of this observation and data, then certainly who they are influences what they see. And of course, WGSN will tell you they include AI in their methodology, which, knowing the resources that AI requires to function, I don't know, is predicting what denim wash people want this fall really a good use of that energy and water? Wgsn, it's using all of these resources to predict its trends. They're probably pretty accurate to a certain extent, right? But basically all these trends are being bought into by every brand out there because most, most companies are using WGSN at this point. So that means we're in a situation where there is one company predicting the trends. And so what you get is a lot of the same stuff everywhere, because like I said, every brand is big paying for the same subscription to the same trends. And that makes it. That makes everything we see out there kind of boring, right? In fact, the era of big trend forecasting has a lot of drawbacks. One problem is that homogenization of what's available for sale in the world, if everyone is selling the same colors and silhouettes, it only reinforces that race to the bottom in terms of pricing, with most brands having to put things on sale very fast because it's the only way they're going to clear through this stuff that everyone else has. They have to be the first person to put it, put it on sale. And that means of course, that these clothes have to be profitable as heck even at a sale price. So of course it's the classic story of low quality materials, cut corners and bad wages for everyone involved in making, shipping and selling these clothes so that they can be profitable when they sell on sale, which will happen pretty fast. So yeah, big trend forecasting might be an issue of environmental and social justice when you really take a step back and look at it, because everybody making the same stuff based on the same trends is leading to all kinds of repercussions downstream. Wow, that's really, really depressing. It goes beyond just going to the mall and being like, there's nothing here, I want to buy next. With every brand using trend forecasts as the hard and fast rule for what gets made, that, that, that stifles innovation. This means no new fabrics, no new colors, no interesting ideas because they feel risky to retailers. And of course, is all of this just a self fulfilling prophecy? If the trends as forecasted are the only things out there available to buy and wear, and therefore that's what people are buying and wearing, was a trend really predicted or just created? That's one of the reasons I'm always like, fuck fashion trends, wear what you want. Because for the past 10 plus years, trends haven't really been indicative of anything connected to what is happening culturally, with a few exceptions here and there. And most trends have been fed to us by marketing and branding, not by what humans are actually choosing. And while I have have a major issue with a lot of the lightning fast micro trends on TikTok, they do seem to be more organic in the way that trends were in the past. Whereas these large overarching trends that we see in stores and you know, in magazines, even at this point, they're sort of manufactured outside of this. Even if you love micro trends from TikTok or you're like, I'm just gonna buy what the store tells me to buy, honestly, you should just wear what makes you happy. Who cares if it's on trend anyway? And really understanding that and coming, I don't know, to peace with that, that you should just wear what you like and that trends are kind of dumb, it aligns with the goal of this entire series which is uncovering the very strategic, highly intentional things that are happening behind the scenes to get us to shop. By unpacking them, we can recognize them out in the world and be more resistant to them. No one is saying don't buy anything ever and for sure no one is saying don't buy anything ever and be super smug about it on social media. Rather, buy the things you need, make the choices that align with your values in the best possible way, but don't buy things just because of trends or some clever marketing that really makes found you in your feels right? And of course, please. Oh my gosh. I can't believe I have to say this. Don't make fun of or judge someone because they're wearing something that you think isn't on trend right now. Like this is not eighth grade. And we also know that trends are really foolish. Wear what you want and let other people wear what they want this episode is part four of a series Unpacking Brands and Branding and I wanted to get started with an explanation of trend forecasting and how seriously most retailers take it. Because the concept of emotional branding has been a trend concept in this century that every brand has been following in one way or another. Just about every person in marketing and branding in the past two decades has read Mark Gob's book Emotional Branding, AKA the Flowers in the Attic of Modern Branding. Go predicted a lot of trends in branding and marketing that were indeed followed by just about every big brand. Was it a self fulfilling prophecy or would these trends have emerged organically? It's hard to say at this point, but we know that in a strange way, brands like to follow the herd. In the previous installment in this series we talked about cause marketing and how it has been a megatrend in marketing and branding from the 2000s through now. And yeah, we see less of it these days, but now it's been a trend for so long that it's almost just a part of doing business. In this episode we're going to break down more of go's branding trend predictions and look for examples of how these were used by various brands over the last couple of decades. And we will also look at the latest hot off the presses marketing and branding trend predictions so that we can spot them out in the wild and stay wary of their ability to manipulate us. Welcome to Clothes Horse, the podcast that hopes I never have to eat another Snackwell cookie because I ate a lot of them in the 90s and I can close my eyes and I can still taste them and it's not good. What a terrible trend. Inedible food Basically that was the trend. I'm your host Amanda and this is episode 242, part four in an ongoing series about brands and how they influence our identities and drive consumerism. In part one, we explored the meanings of brand and branding along with the history of branding. I also revealed some brands that are really just licensed zombies at this point. In Part two, we unpacked the concept of emotional branding and how it has influenced our own relationships with brands, building large communities of strangers who are brought together because of where they like to shop and what they like to buy. In part three, we unpacked Cause Marketing and why it's really not that Charitable. Also, sorry I have to be the ruiner of everything all the time. I definitely did not see my life going in this direction to be the biggest ruiner of all time. But I promise I actually am like pretty fun Hang out with in IRL this week we are going to unpack more of the branding and marketing trends predicted by Mark Gob in his 2000s book Emotional Branding. And those trends are convenience, nostalgia and hope. And we will wrap all this up by examining a recent WGSN trend report about the emotions of consumers and how to market into them as of today. Now this could change because this is a real journey for me as well. I am planning two more parts of this series, an examination of customer data and our own experiences as customers, including your stories. So keep them coming and unpacking Glossary Dossier as a case study in Branding in this Century so send me your stories about brands that you used to be obsessed with and why you aren't anymore. Or maybe you still are. Or maybe a brand that disappointed you, a brand you love because of something they did or didn't do. Or maybe your thoughts on cause marketing. I promise that I will be sharing all of them before we finish this series. It's just this is essentially an emotional and intellectual and creative journey for me as well. As I'm reading more and more I'm pulling the thread and I'm just following that and I'm having a great time and I hope that you are enjoy enjoying listening to this. Anyway, you can record your thoughts as a voice memo on your phone. That is my number one pick. You can just send that to me via email or you can write an email that I will read out loud. But please do not DM me on Instagram, don't send me a message on threads, don't tag me in a post. Chances are I will miss it because my notifications are always blowing up so just email it. My email address is in the show notes. It's always and I'm just going to say it out loud right now, it's amandaoeshorse World. I also just want to talk to you for a few moments about a slight change in clotheshorse. I will be focusing more on deep dives like this branding series, and I'm going to be deprioritizing guest interviews. Sometimes there will be conversations with guests specifically in line with ideas we're currently exploring. And in fact, I've recorded two great conversations that will be coming your way over the next month or so. But let's be honest here, Clothes Horse doesn't really make any money, just enough to cover the operations of it all, not my actual work. That's unlikely to ever change, and I have to come to peace with that because it would mean either taking questionable advertising, shifting the content into a more mainstream space, or haranguing you all into giving me money. And all of these ideas sound terrible to me. So if I'm going to be doing all this unpaid work and set up of, you know, socializing, going outside, relaxing, reading, seeing movies, et cetera, well, it has to be super interesting and rewarding to me from a creative and intellectual perspective. And deep dives like this are super rewarding for me on a personal level. So I want to do more of it. Also, these are topics that don't seem to be discussed on podcasts and I really want someone to talk about them. So I'm going to keep going down these weird rabbit holes. Sometimes guests will fit into that and sometimes they will not. And to be completely blunt, 95% of the people who reach out about being a guest on the podcast, I can't blame them. But they're looking for marketing for their business or project. Sometimes I can shape that into educational and interesting content, and sometimes I can't. I want Closed Source to be a source of inspiration and education. There are plenty of podcasts you can listen to out there that are people chatting. There are plenty of podcasts that have business owners on them, or talk about business or talk about fashion even. I specifically want Closed Horse to be a place where you get information and inspiration about things that others really maybe aren't talking about, but we should be talking about. Otherwise, why does it exist? Right? So this is just going to be a slight change in the format that you might not even really notice. But I just wanted to call it out. And that does mean that some of these episodes, they take a really long time. The previous episode was 40 hours of just writing and research. That was before I even recorded and edited it. So episodes are going to be coming at sporadic times basically like when I can get it done after work or before work. Like right now it's early in the morning, I'm in my pajamas. I'm recording after being up late last night writing, finishing the writing on this and the writing was a several day process because this is just different. So I'm still going to target trying to have an episode out just about every week. But sometimes there will be gaps and that usually means that I am deep research and writing rabbit hole. And I promise they're worth the wait. Will be worth it. Okay, two more reminders before we jump into this week's episode. One is that clotheshorse is coming to the west coast in October. I'll be doing a show in Seattle on 1023 and Portland on 1026. Links to get the tickets are in the show notes. Please go get them. If we sell enough tickets, I'll get to do more shows again in the future. And that sounds amazing to me. We have one last ticket for the Crafternoon at Slow Fashion Academy in Philadelphia on Sunday, September 21st. Get it now before it's gone. I'll share that link in the show notes. It could be gone by the time you hear this, but there's only one way to find out. You gotta go check. All right, we did all the housekeeping. Let's jump into everything.
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Let's take a moment to thank some of the incredible small businesses who keep Clotheshorse going via their generous Patreon support.
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Slow Fashion Academy is a size inclusive sewing and pattern making studio based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Designer and fashion professor Ruby Gertz teaches workshops for hobbyists and aspiring designers so that anyone can learn the foundational skills.
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Of making, mending and altering their own.
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Clothes several times per year. Ruby offers her flagship Sloper Workshop, an in person two day pattern making retreat where you will learn how to drape a set of basic block patterns that capture your unique shape and proportions. You can also use these basic block or sloper patterns as a foundation for infinite styles of garments that are custom made to your body's one of a kind contours or compare your slipper to commercial patterns to see where you might need to alter the shape shape. No more guessing at full bust, flat seam or sway back adjustments. Start with a foundation that fits. Ruby also provides professional design and pattern making services to emerging slow fashion brands and occasionally takes commissions for custom garments and costume pieces. She has also released several PDF sewing patterns for original designs under her brands Spokes and Stitches and Starling Petite Plus. I just want to also add here on a personal note that right now Ruby is actually working with me to create a one of a kind unique to me special dress that I will be wearing for all future clothes horse events including live episodes later this year in the Pacific Northwest. I am so excited to work with Ruby because she is so talented and so knowledgeable about all things clothing creation. Check out the schedule for upcoming workshops, download PDF sewing patterns and learn about additional sewing and Design Services at www.slowfashion.academy. and it's important for me to tell you that that's slowfashion.academy Selena Sanders a.
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Social impact brand that specializes in upcycle clothing using only reclaimed, vintage or thrifted materials from tea towels, linens, blankets and quilts. Sustainably crafted in Los Angeles, each piece is designed to last in one's closet for generations to come. Maximum style Minimal carbon footprint. Shift clothing out of beautiful Astoria, Oregon with a focus on natural fibers, simple hard working designs and putting fat people first. Discover more@shiftwheeler.com late to the party Creating one of a kind statement clothing from vintage, salvaged and thrifted textiles. They hope to tap into the dreamy memories we all hold. Floral curtains, a childhood dress, the wallpaper in your best friend's rec room. All while creating modern, sustainable garments that you'll love wearing and have for years to come. Late to the Party is passionate about celebrating and preserving textiles, the memories they hold and the stories they have yet to tell. Check them out on Instagram latetothepartypeople.
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Vino.
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Vintage Based just outside of la, we love the hunt of shopping secondhand because you never know what you might find. Catch us at flea markets around Southern California by following us on Instagram Vino Vintage so you don't miss our next event. Dylan Paige is an online clothing and lifestyle brand based out of St. Louis, Missouri. Our products are chosen with intention for the conscious community. Everything we carry is animal friendly, ethically made, sustainably sourced and cruelty free. Dylan Paige is for those who never stop questioning where something comes from. We know that personal experience dictates what's sustainable for you and we are here to help guide and support you to make choices that fit your needs. Check us out@dylanpage.com and find us on Instagram Ylanpage Life and Style Salt Hats Purveyors of truly sustainable hats, hand blocked, sewn and embellished in Detroit, Michigan. Find us on Instagram at alt Hats Thumbprint is Detroit's only fair trade marketplace. Located in the historic Eastern Market. Our small business specializes in products handmade by empowered women in South Africa, making a living wage creating things they love like hand painted candles and ceramics. We also carry a curated assortment of sustainable and natural locally made goods. Thumbprint is a great gift destination for both the special people in your life and for yourself. Browse our online store@thumprintdetroit.com and find us on instagramprintdetroit. Vagavan Vintage DTLV is a vintage clothing, accessories and decor reselling business based in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada.
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Not only do we sell in Las.
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Vegas, but we're also located throughout resale markets in San Francisco as well as.
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At a curated boutique called Lux and.
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Ivy located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jessica, the founder and owner of Vagabond Vintage DTLV recently opened the first IRL location located in the Arts District of downtown Las Vegas on August 5th. The shop has a strong emphasis on 60s and 70s garments, single stitch tees and dreamy loungewear. Follow them on Instagram vagabondvintagedtlv and keep an eye out for their website coming fall of 2022.
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Let'S talk about some Emotional Branding Way back in the first part of this series I talked about how some companies don't have branding that focuses on being cool or trying to connect with customers emotionally, and yet their customers are just as likely to show up for an Internet fight with a stranger to defend these brands. One example is Shein. I think at this point everyone knows that Shein kind of sucks, right? I find it hard to believe that there is anyone left on the planet who hasn't heard something negative about Shein. Whether it's just another story about Shein stealing from an artist or having lead in its products, or just churning out really low quality stuff. Obviously those of us who think about fashion a lot also know that Shein has an epic carbon footprint and we know it isn't paying its workers a living wage. And yet Shein keeps growing and growing with a lot of bad news out there in the world about it. A few days ago I was listening to an NPR story about tariffs and apparently while Shein saw a drop in sales in the early months of this year when the de minimis exception was dropped for packages from China as well as products that were made in China that happened months ago for the rest of countries, it kicked in on August 29th. But so Shein's been dealing with this most of this year when that happened at first. Their sales dropped, but now sales have been back and better than ever. They've made it, I don't know, their customers and them, they made it work somehow. So it's interesting because we always thought the de minimis loophole closing that might, I don't know, slow down Shein. And now I'm not so sure. People know that Shein isn't great, but they keep shopping anyway. Why? For some, it really is an issue of access. And I'm not here to make them feel bad about it. It's the only place they can find things that fit them in their budget. But for everyone else who could shop somewhere else, there are three major reasons why they are still shopping from Shein, knowing that Shein is not a good company. One is the low prices. I mean, you remember it's cheap because someone didn't get paid, and in this case it's workers and the artists whose designs were stolen. But the fact is, Shein is known for its low prices. Also, Shein has an almost infinite product offering. I mean, I always joke, like, does a micro trend even exist if you can't find it on Shein? For years before the Internet became as robust and full of information as it is now, I always used to joke that, that if I couldn't find or prove the existence of something on ebay, then it didn't exist. So ebay was such a massive search engine, sort of of like everything that had ever existed on the planet before us, that I could always type it in and find some version of it and learn about it from there. Shein is sort of that way, but for trends, micro trends, clothes in general. The other thing about Shein is, okay, we got these low prices, we've got this like infinite offering of there is the convenience of it all, because you can shop for all of these things, this infinite product offering at low, low prices, without leaving your couch or bed. And most of the stuff will arrive in less than a week with express shipping. And this kind of takes me back to what we talked about at the top of this episode, where back in the day, if you wanted clothes, if you wanted to buy anything, your only option was what was available locally. And even then you still had to get up, get dressed, put on your shoes, get in a car or take a bus or a train and go somewhere to look at that stuff. And now you don't have to do any of that. And you'll have way more options. And so it's just easier and better in every regard, even if the product itself is not good. Which would, you know, of course, make people think maybe this isn't a good option. But you can see how Shein wins out in a time when we are all working more than ever to survive. Something that is fast, cheap and easy is hard to ignore. That's a branding story right there. And that is why people are loyal to Shein. Yes, yes, there are people who are loyal to Shein. Okay, see also Temu and Amazon. Once again, people know that these companies are problematic, but they still shop and shop. And I'm not again talking about people who just need something specific that they literally cannot get somewhere else, that they literally do not have alternatives for. That's just about all of us at this point with something in our lives. Because businesses like Amazon and Walmart have crushed small local businesses. No, I'm talking about people who are doing their regular shopping and their impulse shopping on these platforms, even though they do have other options available to them. People may not think that they are loyal to Amazon or Temu or Shein, but when it becomes your go to first place to look for something, well, you have become loyal, whether you realize it or not. Habits are a form of loyalty that companies like Amazon are thrilled to have. Many of us have that same sort of habitual loyalty to a particular pharmacy, a particular grocery store, places we go for coffee, restaurants. This is a form of emotional branding because these brands have convinced you that they are the right one for you. And when it comes to Amazon or Temu or Shein, they have convinced us that they stand for value, speed and convenience and you can pretty much rely on them to have anything you need. That's a big deal. One of the branding trends that Mark Go predicted in emotional branding was time is even better than money. Saying instead of acquiring more material goods, people want to spend money to create quality time for themselves. And he called out the idea of of self checkout as one of those time saving luxuries that customers wanted. Now I will say as an introvert, I low key love self checkout because I don't have to talk to anyone. But I also recognize that in the weird dystopia of 2025, self checkout is really just a way for companies to pay less people to work, right? It's not dissimilar to using AI instead of designers to create clothing. It's not dissimilar to paying for a trend forecasting service rather than having a person or a team on your staff who does that work. Now, Mark Gob is writing during A different time in the 2000s when self checkout was not so prevalent and did feel new, exciting and kind of a little bit luxurious. As he's writing about all of this, the full repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis are not yet fully visible. And namely the way the recession changed work here in the United States and many other countries. The 2010s after the global financial crisis and the recession, that period established the very abnormal norm of the gig economy. We're talking Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, even Amazon delivery and warehouse jobs, along with with Perma freelancing. Basically working full time four years for the same company without the benefits of being a permanent employee like healthcare and PTO. The success of platforms like Uber, DoorDash, Instacart and Amazon are directly linked to this idea of convenience and giving people more time to do the things they like. Except that only works for some people because everyone else, namely those doing the delivery or working in the warehouse or permanently freelancing, found themselves working multiple jobs to exist. And startup culture cemented this idea that we should be working all the time. In fact, every time someone at the horrible feminist brand would hit a wall, have a breakdown and leave, the CEO was like like, well, that's how startup life is and some people just can't handle it. The implication there was that needing a work life balance was a sign of weakness. And it sounds absurd to say it out loud, but then again, that's exactly what the hustle culture of the 2010s was all about. Work, work and work some more. And maybe along the way do some Instagram posts about how hard you hustle at as some kind of humble brag. You still see this kind of content on every social media platform, including LinkedIn, but it feels like a relic of a really, a really weird time for those of us who were then and now forced to hustle in order to remain housed and fed. Hustle culture was not and is not a choice. It was mandatory. And as we have found ourselves working more and more, we have had to lean into these convenience brands like Amazon and DoorDash. The Ouroboros, a snake or dragon eating its own tail is a great analogy to hustle culture and Mark Gob's trend prediction of convenience. We hustle so hard that we do not have the time to buy groceries, cat food or dinner. So we use one of these convenience brands which cost more money than doing it ourselves. So we have to hustle even harder to afford it, which means we have even less Time. So we lean into convenience brands even more. The world as it exists right now makes it really hard for us to be stable financially, right? Which means we have to work super hard to afford some level of stability, which means we don't have time to do these other things. Elements of caring for ourselves, which we then outsource to someone else, which costs us more money, which means we need to make more money, which means we need to continue to hustle, hustle even harder to maintain financial stability and pay for those things to be done for us. And so we just keep going. The more we work, the less time we have, the more we have to outsource, the more we need to work to afford that. And it just keeps going and going and going and it's pretty depressing, right? Things like food delivery and fast prime shipping are examples of convenience as a branding moment. But the list doesn't just end there. When you look around us, you can see convenience as a brand identity. Sometimes it's covered with a few other layers of brand identity so we don't spot it right away, but. But the convenience factor is why we show up, right? Example, the expansion of takeout food options in grocery stores, right? The grocery store is normally where you would go to get food that you would take home and cook, but now they have a lot more food that's already ready to eat. And over the past decade they have expanded the footprint of these takeout food sections in their store because it's pretty profitable and people want it. How about the exponential growth of so called fast casual restaurants like Chipotle, Sweet Greens, Cava, et cetera? It feels like you're getting a home cooked meal sort of because you pick out the elements and it's really fast. What about meal delivery boxes like Blue Apron for so many people it saves them from having to go to the grocery store, which saves them time. Clothing subscription services like Stitch fix that pick out the clothes for you and send them straight to your door. You don't even have to deal with the inconvenience and time of going out. Clothes shopping, even the idea of subscribe and save when the same items are shipped to you every month with a very slight discount. That is convenience right there that we are paying for. And we may not even be getting the best pricing on those products, but the illusion that the fact that we have committed to getting them every month and therefore getting a low, lower price makes us feel like not only are we getting the convenience, but we're also getting the value. So it's sort of a double whammy of emotional branding right there. How about order online and pick up in store or at curbside. Even ordering from the Starbucks app, it saves you, you know, if you're ordering something from Target, it saves you the time of parking and walking around Target looking for something. That's a lot of time. But even ordering online from Starbucks and picking it up saves you the, what, one minute of ordering? I don't know. But it works on us, right? It's convenience. Even the rise of sort of like grown up lunchables that I've seen, they, you know, they portray them as more like portable charcuterie trays or protein boxes, but they are grown up lunchables. Let's just live with it, let's accept it, let's be loud and proud about it. These are grown up lunchables. Also foods like meal replacements like Soylent and like the 1000 different varieties of protein bars. All of those food boxes at Starbucks, which I totally lived off of during my peak hustle culture years. These, these grown up lunchables, these soylent protein bars, the boxes at Starbucks, they are all designed to say, hey, you don't have time to make food, shop for food, do anything really serious in terms of the procurement of food. But we're promising you that this meal option is not only convenient, but in theory, super nutritionally the best choice you could make. That's also hitting on a lot of our anxieties, anxieties about health, you know, but also giving us that convenience. So there's a lot of emotional branding going on right there as well. And wow, there are so many meal replacement and like bars out there right now. Like, there's like 10 new brands every week. I swear, cashing in on this combination of health anxiety and no time for all of us. So hustle culture in itself really helped fuel this convenience economy. And, you know, I think that when Mark Go talked about convenience as a marketing story, he really thought it was like, oh, people just want to have more time to themselves. But it was really like, oh, we just want to stay alive. That's how it really played out. But the other thing about the hustle culture era is not only did it have us shopping for convenience things, it also made us just shop so much more in general because we needed all of these other marketing and brand trends to help us cope with all of that overworking, right? Like self care, this idea that we should take a moment and put on a sheet, mask and paint our nails to treat ourselves because we work so hard. This has fueled a massive increase in the industry that sells U.S. beauty products, skincare and bath bombs. In fact, I would say you don't have the massive expansion of Ulta and Sephora over the last decade without everybody working themselves to death. Because we just need these things to feel okay. And speaking of just needing things to feel okay, supplements, oh my gosh, just growing and growing and growing. Vitamins and powders and everything else that's supposed to just help us be better every day. They're supposed to keep us unstressed but full of energy. I mean, for a few years there were so many Internet brands of supplements primarily targeting women that were shipped right to your door like flow and care of. And some of these brands have gone away or been bought by other brands and absorbed. But new brands keep popping up too, because guess what? People are still stressed out and exhausted and don't have the time to do the things that might cure that stressed out exhaustion. And rather they're more interested in a pill or powder for it because that's all they can accommodate at this point. Travel. Travel has been this like aspirational lifestyle since basically Instagram came on the scene. And throughout the 2010s everywhere I worked, we marketed into this idea of travel, that travel was something you needed as a form of self care. It was the reason you were working so hard all the time. And don't worry, we would be happy to sell you a whole suitcase full of new clothes. In fact, we'll sell you the suitcase too and all the things you need to pack and all the travel accoutrement, all so that you can take care of yourself by taking a trip because you work so hard. Online therapy even is another great example of like a phenomenon that really has blown up up because people are stressed, they are tired, they are unhappy, and they work all the time so they don't have time to go see a therapist. Hustle culture has been incredible for online therapy companies. Fast fashion in general has benefited in a major way from an overworked and underpaid society because we don't have time to do laundry or repair things, so we buy replacements instead. We buy more stuff in general because we're fucking tired and depressed. And this exhaustion makes us more vulnerable to marketing as a whole because we're looking for something to be hopeful about, even if it is that order from Zara that we just placed. One last thing I want to discuss on the subject of convenience as a means of selling us stuff is that way back in the early days of clotheshorse My friend Amy was a guest talking about apparel production. I think it was episodes three and four. And she shared something that many who work in production live by, and that is fast, cheap or good. You can have two, but you can't have all three. And the thing about convenience brands that really came up in the 2010s, like Amazon, was that for a long time we could somehow get all three. Stuff came fast. It was crazy cheap, underselling any other retailer or service, and it was usually pretty good. But what many of us didn't realize is that these services were cheap because they wanted to get us hooked. In fact, these companies were not profitable and they were bleeding money in order to become a habit for us. Uber and Lyft are great examples. In the 2010s when I was living in LA, I did not have a car. I took public transportation and Uber because it was wildly cheaper than owning a car, which I could not afford. I was not making enough working in fashion to afford a car. Taking an Uber to work would cost me as little as $7, and I rarely did that because that that's how much of a wildly thrifty person I was. So I preferred paying 250 to take the subway. But when I worked super late, it was nice to know that a ride home would only cost a few dollars more and I probably wouldn't be walking alone late at night on Santa Monica in very impractical shoes. Probably Jeffrey Campbell Litas. Uber was a resource that I could afford. Well, the cheap car rides were an illusion meant to get us hooked on ride sharing, which was a very new idea at the time. I remember trying to explain Uber to my mom back then, and she was like, so wait, you get in a stranger's car? And it was like, well, yes, technically, that is what's happening. And when I say it out loud, I'm like, wow, that is wild. But how Uber and Lyft got people to, you know, dispel the anxiety of, like, wait, I'm gonna go ride in a stranger's car was by making it really cheap and easy. And I'm Gonna share a 2019 article from the LA Times written by Sam Dean that explains it best. I'm gonna share that in the show notes. I want you to, like, give it a read if you want to understand more why and how these prices were so low. Dean wrote, The 2010s have been the decade of the subsidized ride. Uber and Lyft duked it out on the streets of American cities, burning mountains of venture capital to keep fares low in the hopes of winning the battle for market share. The costs were steep. Lyft lost nearly $1 billion in 2018. Uber, with its global scale and broader ambition, lost $3 billion. And by the way, that's in one year, okay? The private investors that pumped money into these companies were looking for growth at all cost, betting that one of the companies would grow large enough to reach monopoly status or fund the research to invent self driving cars. Of course, when Uber and Lyft decided to ipo, meaning go public, that changed everything, because they could no longer burn money. People don't want to buy stock in a company that is literally giving money away. They also couldn't double prices overnight because customers were going to freak out, so they paid their drivers less. They fought unionization. They. They spent, strangely enough, epic amounts of money fighting legislation in California that would have made drivers employees and not independent contractors. And then they reluctantly raised prices when all of these things were not enough to make the company profitable. Similarly, Amazon bled money over prime shipping for years, forcing it to squeeze its workers in every possible way just to stem the bleeding of money. Like free shipping overnight or even in two days should not be free, okay? Because it costs a lot of money. And Amazon was trying to create the illusion that that was possible. And I think it helped fuel every person. If you sell on Etsy or a small business, every person who has ever messaged you or complained about having to pay for shipping, you can thank Amazon for that, because Amazon created this illusion that we could get stuff that fast for free. But how it really did that was one, by losing money every day, and two, by squeezing every single worker involved with that company in any way. This meant even worse working conditions for employees in the warehouse. And the drivers delivering the products, I mean, they're peeing in bottles, they're stressed out, they're underpaid. They're not even considered real employees. Ultimately, Amazon now has recognized that you can only squeeze the people so hard, and then they're still not profit. So Amazon now has pulled back on the speed of its shipping because it just wasn't working. And of course, companies like Doordash and Instacart have been wreaking havoc in restaurants and grocery stores while wildly underpaying their workers, doing the work of shopping and delivering once again, because there's just no way in which the math, maths where, where customers still like the price and workers can be paid a living wage for their work. And so when we are getting things so fast, so cheaply, so conveniently, there is another human who is paying for it, because that's the thing. You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, but if you want that, it can't also be good. That means the product quality declines and the workers involved are treated worse, worse and worse. Like a lot of the branding trends we have talked about in this series, convenience as a branding moment is really just an illusion. In fact, it forces people who are already stretched too thin in terms of money and time to participate in the exploitation of other humans who are stretched even thinner in terms of time and money. By now we have debunked over and over again the illusion of value that many fast fashion brands and really fast everything brands are offering us. We think we are getting a good deal, so we buy it. But in most cases we are receiving something low quality that will need to be replaced soon. And I don't want to go into that again, because if you've been listening long enough, you know this. But even this idea that a certain brand or store has the lowest prices, that things will always be the best, best price there, that is actually a form of emotional branding in itself. We trust those brands to have the lowest prices, but that doesn't mean they do. In fact, Amazon is a great example of a brand that for so long offered the illusion of fast, cheap and good. And not only is most of the stuff no longer good, the prices are usually not lower than other big brands, box stores and even local businesses. Yet many customers assume that they are getting the lowest price just by shopping from Amazon. Even as Amazon has been discovered raising prices a few weeks before Prime Day just to make them low and on sale for Prime Day. Of course, the idea of low prices and convenience are types of emotional branding. We are tired, we are poorer than our parents, and we just want something to be a little bit easy.
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If you're enjoying this episode, then this is a great time to remind you that my work here at Clothes Horse is made possible by the support of listeners like you. Just like NPR and these great small businesses. Please go give them your your support. Blank CAS or Blanket Coats by cas, is focused on restoring, renewing and reviving the history held within vintage and heirloom textiles by embodying the love, craft and energy that is original to each vintage textile. As I transfer it into a new garment, I hope we can reteach ourselves to care for and mend what we have, have and make it last. Blank CAS lives on Instagram at Blankcas and a website will be Launched soon@blankcas.com Located in Whistler, Canada, Velvet Underground is a velvet jungle full of vintage and secondhand clothing plants, a vegan cafe and lots of rad products from other small sustainable businesses. Our mission is to create a brand and community dedicated to promoting self expression as well as educating and inspiring a more sustainable and conscious lifestyle both for the people and the planet. Find us on Instagram @shopvelvetunderground or online at www.shopvelvetunderground.com Republica Unicornia yarns Handmade yarn and notions for the color of sa Made with love and some swearing in fabulous Atlanta, Georgia by head yarn wench Kathleen. Get ready for rainbows with a side of giving a damn. Republica Unicornia is all about making your own magic using small batch, responsibly sourced hand dyed yarns and thoughtfully made notions. Slow fashion all the way down and discover the joy of creating your very own beautiful hand knitting, knit, crocheted or woven pieces. Find us on Instagram @republicaunicorniarns and at www.republicaunicornia.com picnic wear a slow fashion brand ethically made by hand from vintage and dead stock materials, most notably vintage towels. Founder Dani has worked in the industry as a fashion Designer for over 10 years, but started Picnic Wear in response to her dissatisfaction with the industry's shortcomings. Picnic Wear recently moved to rural North Carolina where all their sewing and accessories are now designed and cut, but the majority of their sewing is done by skilled garment workers in New York City. Their customers take comfort in knowing that all their sewists are paid well above New York City minimum wage. Picnicwear offers minimal waste and maximum offense. Future Vintage over Future Garbage Cute Little Ruin is an online shop dedicated to providing quality vintage and secondhand clothing, vinyl and home items in a wide range of styles and price points. If it's ethical and legal, we try to find a home for it. Vintage style with progressive values. Find us on Instagram. Utelittleruin Is there a little bit of Italy in your soul? Are you an enthusiast of pre loved decor and accessories?
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Bring vintage Italian style and history into.
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Your space with the pewter thimble.
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We source useful and beautiful things and mend them where needed.
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We also find gorgeous illustrations and make them print worthy tarot cards, tea towels and hand picked treasures. Available to you from the comfort of your own home, responsibly sourced from across Rome, lovingly renewed by fairly paid artists and artisans with something for every budget. Discover more at theputerthimble.com Deco Denim is a startup based out of San Francisco and it sells clothing and accessories that are sustainable, gender fluid, size inclusive and high quality, made to last for years to come. Deco Denim is trying to change the way you think think about buying clothes. Founder Sarah Mattis wants to empower people to ask important questions like where was this made? Was this garment made ethically? Is this fabric made of plastic? Can this garment be upcycled and if not, can it be recycled? Sign up@decodenim.com to receive $20 off your first purchase. They promise not to spam you and send out no more than three emails a month month with two of them surrounding education or a personal note from the founder. Again, that's decodenim.com.
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Another key emotional branding trend forecasted by Mark gob in the 2000s was nostalgia, which according to the Oxford Dictionary is a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations, he explained. This trend is partly about soothing anxiety, a need to be reassured and grounded as we move forward into a super fast paced and seemingly uncertain future. It is also equally about a sense of excitement and empowerment, being at a vantage point in time when we are able to choose the best of all eras. Now, Gob felt that this desire for nostalgia would be primarily driven by baby boomers nostalgic for the 50s and 60s of their youth and Gen X, feeling a longing for their 70s and early 80s childhood. And I laughed a little bit about this trend because, sir, nostalgia has been a marketing ploy my entire life. When I was a small child, I remembered so many commercials for music compilations of the hits of the 50s through the 70s. I was particularly fond of Freedom Rock and I begged my mom to order it. You know what? Let's listen to a bit of that commercial because it is iconic.
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Hey man, is that Freedom Rock? Yeah man. Well turn it on, man. Turn it down, man. Hey man, remember the good old days? You know, war, protest, going to jail. Well man, we found this new album called Freedom Rock. It's got all those great songs we used to groove to back then. Just listen. Good God y', all, freedom rock has it all, man. 40 original rock hits by the original artists on four records. Three cassettes or two CDs. Here's more. A white room with black curtains. You see I've been through the desert on a horse with no name, man, you should get Freedom Rock too. Four records or three cassettes are only 19.95. Two CDs only 24.95. Here's how to order credit card and COD customers, call toll free 1-800-248-6800 or save COD fees by sending 19.95 for four records or three cassettes or 24.95 for two compact discs, plus $3.00 shipping and handling to Freedom Rock, 1033 Fleet National Bank Building Department A, Providence, R.I. going to jail.
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I told you. Iconic Commercial these music compilation sets were specifically intended to cash in on Boomer nostalgia. Next, there were the extraordinary number of movies that came out in the 80s and 90s that specifically took place in the childhood and young adult years of the boomer generation from the 50s and 60s. We're talking dirty Dancing, Peggy Sue Got Married, Hairspray, Back to the Future, Forrest Gump. I also remember watching Happy Days After School in syndication, so it was like a rerun, but it was a 1970s sitcom set in the 1950s. Greece did a similar thing, made in the 70s, but set in the 50s. All this media that I was consuming that was about the 50s, along with the prevalence of fake 50s retro diners like Johnny Rockets would lead me to believe as a kid that perhaps the 1950s and early 60s were the most important time in human history. In the 90s and the 2000s, we saw a mishmash of nostalgia used in advertising, entertainment, and fashion. Like, for example, 1970s fashion was cool in the 90s in a more like leisure suit, Mr. Furley kind of way. But then 70s came back in the 2010s with a more Stevie Nicks angle. Of course, films set in the 70s were huge in the 90s, primarily targeting gen X hipsters. We're talking movies like the Ice Storm, the Virgin Suicides and Dazed and Confused. And by the way, my friends and I went to see Dazed and Confused in the theater. We smoked so much weed before and after that movie that I swear an entire cloud of smoke emerged from the minivan we were in and made it practically invisible when I opened the door outside my mom's house. And I just want to be clear that I was like, pretty young then. Like, I was not an adult. And we were just. I don't know how my mom didn't notice this mega cloud of smoke that came out of the car or how weird I was when I got out of the car. But the story gets even weirder because I got out of the car as my mom was coming out of the house, and I was like, so high. And she said, hey, let's go to the grocery store. So then I had to get in my mom's Very small car, no doubt out smelling like a bong, and go grocery shopping where I was like, so, so paranoid, so uncomfortable, so unfocused. There's. I don't know how my mom did not know I was high. Seriously, I really thought I was about to get grounded and somehow I didn't. Anyway, the 70s, huge in the 90s, right? There was also that 70s show, but even more 70s color palettes and font were a part of any cool sort of countercultural indie brand in the 90s. And to be clear, Gen X and Elder Millennials were the target customer of brands using that aesthetic. As we got into the 2000s, nostalgia for the 80s became a thing, with shows like Freaks and Geeks and movies like Donnie Darko and Wet Hot American Summer. American Apparel was basically the early 80s, when it still felt a little 70s wrapped up in creepiness and indie sleaze and electro Clash were filled with 80s workout clothes, cocktail dresses and little Chanel bags. And at the same time, because in the 80s, people were super nostalgic for the 50s, the 50s made a little bit of a comeback aesthetically in the aughts, especially with advertising. And along the way, hipsters were falling into different groups based on which era they admired the most. There were the 1960s, and those people would dress like cute secretaries and flight attendants. They would wear glasses and bangs. The 1970s kind of hipsters were in a very, like, they were very rock and roll, right? There were the 1980s sort of hipsters, which included a lot of Coke and maybe just maybe a little bit of 90s hipsters. As we moved into the 2010s, this nostalgia, this mishmash of eras, has just been happening all the time. But Gob was correct to predict that it would become even more of a mishmash and even bigger as the decades progressed, even though he definitely did not foresee what would happen as we got into the late 2000 and tens and early into the 2000 and twenties. That's because nostalgia as a marketing tool picked up momentum in 2016 as we began to feel more and more grief and despair about life in the Trump years and then a global pandemic. So we saw long gone brands rise from the dead, meaning their intellectual property was licensed by someone else to create fast fashion. I'm thinking dolls kill licensing Delia's. Those clothes are egregiously low quality and make me so sad. I don't. It's like destroys the legacy that Delia's has in my mind. Or there were like multiple companies in the last 10 years that have tried to bring back Von Dutch. Taco Bell launched a decades menu in 2024 that brought back popular items from the 1960s through the 2000s. And if you were unaware of that, this I'm really sorry, but it was a hot hot topic on the Taco Bell subreddit. McDonald's tried adult Happy Meals in 2022. Like let's give adults some fond memories from their childhood. And that thing was so wildly successful that I don't think they're going to do it again because it was apparently an operational nightmare. Polly pockets relaunched in 2021 and earlier this year Lisa says God did a Polly Pocket collection. I also know I read a really loving Architectural Digest piece about the resurgence of Folly Pockets that really warmed my heart. I'll try to find it and share it in the show notes with you because it was just a fun read. This is just the beginning of the list of things that have been marketed or sold to us because nostalgia works and because we want nostalgia. Even going back to the top of this episode, when I talked about all of the licensed character products product at the mall, a lot of that is characters and brands of the past that people are either rediscovering now or remembering now and enjoying that comfort or discovering for the first time but enjoying the nostalgia of it all nonetheless. All of these examples I just showed you. I mean that is just the beginning, right? Of a long list of brands and products that have been relaunched and revamped over the last decade. And often they are targeting millennials, Gen Xers, sometimes Gen Z with things they remember as kids in hopes of getting them to spend some of their adult money. Like when is Littlest Pet Shop doing a relaunch because it will be very successful Right now you can buy reissued versions of classic Rainbow Brite, Strawberry Shortcake, Teletubbies and more. The main nostalgic thing that I want is an esprit oversized canvas tote bag this wanted so badly in middle school but never got to have. And I would probably buy it if I saw it, I really would. Because that's the thing about nostalgia. Sometimes it's just about fixing history in our minds and other times it's about escape to what we perceive as a simpler time. And maybe, as Mark Gob thought, it is about finding something we don't have right now, he wrote, I know we are missing something that is genuine and true. We are seeking more trust, authenticity and truth. Of course, interestingly, a lot of the nostalgia products aren't as good as the original the dolls kill Delia stuff is a great example. Or things that feel nostalgic to me. Like, I don't know, Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies. Iconic part of my childhood. Either they aren't as good as they used to be or they were never that good to begin with. But regardless, nostalgia is hard to resist and I think the best thing we can do is ask why do I want this American Girl doll or this Dr. Pepper lip smacker? Am I trying to fix history or am I just looking for a break from the bleakness of life in 2025? Regardless of the reason we want that thing, we have to admit that our desire is rooted in emotion and that's why nostalgia is so effective for selling stuff. The last marketing trend that Mark Gob saw as significant in the aughts that was this idea of hope as leveraged by the Obama campaign. Now I am not here to have an Internet leftist debate about the Obama presidency with you. That's another podcast hosted by someone else. But I do want to talk to you about why his campaign was different from previous campaigns and why it worked. And I think it starts with examining where we were in the United States in 2008. To be blind, things sucked unless you were rich, white, or maybe, maybe a child. Since 911 our personal liberties and privacy have been whittled away thanks to legislation like the Patriot Act. The US was in multiple wars in the Middle east thanks to greed. If you've never heard someone chant no blood for oil then you don't know about the 2000s. The social safety net was whittled down to almost nothing with drastic cuts in Medicaid aid, SNAP and cash assistance AKA welfare, making it even harder to be a working poor person here in the United States. It was an incredibly shitty time to be a woman. Thanks to extreme diet culture, rape culture, and open and so called ironic misogyny. Health care here in the US was shitty. If you didn't have a job, you probably couldn't see a doctor without tempting financial doom. If you had a so called pre existing condition, your treatment options were limited. You might not even be able to get health insurance at all. So that's happening. But then there's this massive global recession with many people losing their homes, their jobs, any sense of security. Those of us who did hold onto our jobs were stuck. We had to deal with cut benefits, freezes on our raises and promotions. If you graduated from college or high school during that recession, I'm really really sorry. The 2000s were horrible and the US was an embarrassment globally. It was really hard to feel hopeful about anything. I was like, man, I don't know how I'm so young right now. How am I expected to live many more decades in this world? It was really, really hard. And then this senator from Illinois bar, Barack Obama, arrived on the scene. And he had a different way of speaking to people. He focused on change. He said, yes, we can. He sold this idea that we were all in this together. And when he spoke, he genuinely seemed to believe that, which felt magical and rare after decades of inauthentic politicians. He stood for consistency, transparency, and sincerity, which was just so new and fresh. His campaign used the Internet to connect with voters, which also seemed indicative of a new generation of leadership, an era of change. And through all of that, he brought hope to so many. And he made everyone feel like they had a place in what he was building, an important part to play for all of us. I felt it. I was beyond excited. And I ugly cried the night Obama won the 2008 election because it felt like the dawn of a new era where all of us who had felt unseen for so long were going to be seen. We're talking about the country's first black president, something that had previously seemed impossible. It meant there were opportunities for all of us out there. And just knowing that he was going to be the guy in the White House made me feel safer than I had in years, just optimistic. Mark Gob felt that brands had an opportunity to follow the lead of the Obama campaign, using hope and inclusion as a marketing strategy. As long as the product was authentic, as Mark called it, and the connection was, as he called it, genuine. He said what brands will learn by observing the Obama campaign is that people, when motivated, flock to the ideals that will help them feel better about who they are. In the commercial world, most consumers will not stop buying, but they will be more selective while buying less for personal, ecological, or economical reasons. They will still need brands that help them define who they are. And I do want to call out here that something that is a recurring theme in Mark Gob's book, once again written in the 2000s, is he felt that people were starting to recognize that they had too much stuff, it wasn't making them happy, and that they were looking for new ways to feel happy. And so as part of that, they would buy less stuff, but what they did buy would be more meaningful to them. Now. Now, I think that's still catching on, but it's interesting that he saw it 20 something years ago. Right. And we're still working our way through that. Like, consumerism only picked up in the 2010s, but I think more and more people every day are kind of like, wow, this stuff doesn't actually make me happy. It just took us a long time to get there. But here he is saying, like, listen, people are going to buy less stuff, but they are going to buy things that make them feel like they're a part of something that make them feel good. He gets to the core of the main reason people buy stuff and where and when they buy makes them feel a certain way. And specifically in this century, we do a lot of buying based on how unhappy or stressed or tired or broke we feel at any given moment. Think about it. Convenience makes us feel less tired. Low prices make us feel like we can have more nostalgia makes us feel comfort and hope. Well, it. It helps us get out of bed to face another day. The 2010s were not a perfect time, but they were certainly, at least until 2016, a little less bleak. Hope was good for marketing because it kept the vibes flowing and it let customers feel like they were part of bigger, sort of like virtue signaling via shopping. And from 2016 through today, we just needed something, anything, to make us feel a little bit more optimistic. A lot of the marketing tropes of the 2010s are definitely spinoffs of that concept. The hashtag girlboss and female red companies and all that feminist merch. I mean, listen, I felt it hard because I had lived through the 2000s and all the horrible diet culture and harassment and American Apparel of it all. And the other thing for me that made me specifically, I don't know, vulnerable to the spell of girlboss was that my entire adult life working, the men were always in leadership roles while the women did most of the work. And I felt very, very strongly this pressure, or not even pressure, this depression, I suppose, this disappointment that there was a low ceiling on what I would be allowed to accomplish in life because I had been assigned female at birth, like, just because of that gender assignment. And GirlBoss was appealing to me because it said, no, women can be in charge too. Obviously. Deeply flawed movement. The more I lived in it and worked in it, I could see it, but I see why it sold stuff, because so many people wanted to feel that there was not a low ceiling on what they could do with their lives. How about all of that cause marketing and brands that stand for something that was all about hope and optimism and people being able to help make the world a better place. Even greenwashing. Greenwashing says to us, yes, you can save the earth by buying this T shirt made of recycled plastic. So, yeah, greenwashing sucks. But you see why it works because it capitalizes on our desire for hope to be a part of a better future. In fact, all of these brands out there are telling us, us hope it can be yours with the low, low price of a pair of Nike shoes or a bottle of Dove body Wash or maybe an away brand suitcase or a pair of toms. We know that that is not true. But we see now, as we're unpacking this, why it works, why it sells stuff. Which brings me to the final part of this episode. And it's going to be a full circle moment. Are you ready? Well, about a month ago, wgsn, remember our trend forecasting megabrand, published a white paper called future consumer 2027 emotions. And in the introduction it said, since the pandemic and the poly crisis that followed, emotion became the central driver of all consumer behavior. How we shut down shop, what we buy and the brands that we choose have become inextricably linked with the way that we feel. I really hope that WGSN is sending, like a royalty check to Mark Gob's estate, because this is essentially what he was saying, right? WGSN says it has identified six key emotions that will shape consumer behavior. In this white paper, it introduces three of them. So, seriously, if someone out there has a WGSN subscription and wants to send me the other three emotions, I would be eternally grateful and I would obviously share them on a future episode. The three emotions that WGSN identifies in this paper are strategic joy. And these are exact quotes from the paper, these descriptions. So strategic joy is explained as. To combat negativity and reimagine the world as a more inspiring, inclusive and affirming place, joy will be essential. The next emotion is witherwill, described as the longing to be free from responsibility. It will shape 2027 as people continue to be overwhelmed amid a poly crisis. Man, we really are in a poly crisis. The more I think about it, there are so many crises. The last emotion in this paper is suspicious optimism, which WGSN explains, as people grow apprehensive about the role of technology and AI, they will be tempering optimism with suspicion. And to be fair, these are all feelings that I'm feeling, like they're not wrong. So let's take a moment to unpack these emotions a little bit more and sort of explore, you know, in some, in some ways. Maybe we're even going to forecast here how brands will use this information, this trend forecast to create products to sell us and market them to us. Strategic joy, according to the paper, couples joy with purpose and it is intended to help cope with the, quote, prolonged stress, stress, boredom and dysregulation of the last few years. Okay, yeah, I feel this Brands are encouraged to lean into play, humor, positive habits, positive mindsets, personal well being and so called pleasure activism. Which sounds a little bit like cause marketing to me. But I expect that we will see this concept of strategic joy play out as bright fun colors in clothing and home goods. Sort of like dopamine dressing for everything around us. We'll see an endless array of supplements, workout stuff, comfy clothes, healthy comfort foods, party supplies, fun books, and anything else related to the fun and joy of being a kid. So look for some nostalgia here too. Witherwill is all about combating everyone's sense of of burnout. Look for a move away from our digital devices. I mean who isn't feeling kind of over like the nonstop emails, all night texts and social media, AKA you know, where people go to be their worst selves? I'm over it. I suspect this will mean from a commercial standpoint that we are going to be sold devices that force us to stay away from our devices. We're going to be sold more travel and getting into nature, self care, comfy bedding and clothes, binging books and movies and apps and services that lighten our load. There is so much money to be made off of our sense of burnout. Suspicious optimism is built upon the idea that most of us distrust what we read and see online more than ever, whether it's in the news or on our fyp. AI of course, makes it super difficult to trust our own eyes at this point, which is also very frustrating. This one. Marketing into suspicious optimism. It's going to be interesting as a marketing approach and I'm going to be keeping my eye out for it. I'm guessing we will see more brands claiming radical transparency and trustworthiness, maybe aligning with content creators and celebrities that have the trust of their fans. I don't know. This one's going to be interesting because I think a lot of people don't trust brands, right? Except for those people who like really trust TJ Maxx. But most of us don't trust big companies. How are they going to get us to trust them again? I don't know. I'll be watching. The thing about all of these emotional trends is that they will 100% be used to develop products and marketing campaigns. This is, after all, what WGSN does. And in a weird way, I kind of like reading them now so we can spot them playing out in front of us in the near future. After all, the thing about all of this emotional branding is that it connects with our emotions and our most inner selves. It's hard to spot because it feels so personal. It's hard to have a critical eye when it's something you feel, but when we can keep an eye out for it, it maybe we can see it and kind of resist it before it permeates our sort of outer shell of skepticism. And that's where I want to end this installment of the series with the acknowledgment that if you have found yourself loving a brand because of its charitable give back or super convenience or perceived low prices, no one blames or judges you if you bought something just because it righted some wrong from your childhood or gave you a minute of sweet nostalgia. No one thinks you're a lesser person if you bought a feminist tea because it made you feel empowered to do that, seriously, so have millions of other people. Emotional branding is the gold standard for selling stuff in the 21st century because it works so well. It sells without overtly selling because it is so personal. And that means we also don't judge one another for falling for our emotional branding either. I mean, it's designed to manipulate us, and people have spent lots of time figuring out how to get it right to make it as effective as possible. Emotional branding and marketing knows that we just want to feel loved, safe and happy. We are willing to buy something that offers a chance to be unafraid and optimistic. In fact, we have been told our entire lives that stuff will bring happiness. Nothing annoys and depresses me more than someone being judgy and sanctimonious on social media while evoking the name Clothes Horse like that goes against everything that I personally stand for and everything I want my work to stand for. We're not here to judge anyone for anything they have bought or not bought. I mean, come on, there's way worse stuff happening in the world. Rather, I think that we're all on this journey together. Along the way, we learn things together and our perspective changes together. We reduce, we refuse, we resist. We do all of that together and rather than making others feel bad about what they have bought or are thinking about buying, we give them knowledge and hope that the world can be better. We extend a hand to invite them to join us on our journey. We bring light and a new way of doing things. That's that's how real change happens. And you don't have to buy a T shirt to get it. Thanks for listening to another episode of Clotheshorse. Written, researched, edited all the things by me me, Amanda Lee McCarty. If you liked what you heard, please leave a Rating A Review Subscribe Tell your friends all those things. If you didn't like the podcast, you don't need to do any of those. That's great too. If you'd like to support my work financially, there are many ways you can do that. You can find all that in the show notes or in my bio on just about every social media platform. There's a merch shop@closehorsepodcast.com that you can check out as well. Thanks as always to my other half, Mr. Justin Travis White, for our music and audio support, and I will be back very soon with the next installment in this series. Bye.