Create Tomorrow, The WGSN Podcast

WGSN CEO Carla Buzasi speaks to CEO and Co-Founder of beauty company Deciem, Nicola Kilner. Carla and Nicola discuss, the impact of seemingly endless Zoom calls on consumers' beauty decisions, the reasons behind creating a social activist manager role within the business and offering a simplified, uniform product range to a global consumer among many other things.

Retail is once more in a state of flux. The pandemic led to huge shifts in consumer behaviour in 2020 and this is set to continue into 2021. In the US alone 11,000 stores closed and 40 major retailers went bankrupt last year. Online spending also reached new heights accounting for 27.3% of global overall retail sales, growing by a third over the course of the year.  Retailers need to adapt to a future where digitally facilitated shopping trips are the norm.

At WGSN we have been discussing the growing rental markets for fashion as well as furniture and interiors for a number of years now, this has accelerated in recent years due to the increasing consumer demand for sustainable and flexible lifestyles. Henrietta Thompson co-founded Harth in 2018, and became a pioneer of the furniture rental market in the UK. In the last six months Harth has seen a 50% increase in rental requests and a 60% increase in stock listed by private lenders.

January tends to be the time of year when many of us pull our gym kit out of the back of our cupboards and generally set goals to become the best versions of ourselves. The wellness sector is worth $4.5 trillion per year and has been growing at 6.4% annually, twice the rate of global economic growth.  Petah Marian is joined by experts from across WGSN to discuss how wellness is undergoing something of a detox to become more democratic, and why we need to start thinking about it as "wellbeing".

In a special episode WGSN CEO Carla Buzasi and Senior Strategist for WGSN Insight Petah Marian unite to take a look at some of the  10 key trends in consumer behaviour and product development for 2021 and beyond. The trends reveal the future direction for business strategy, product and experience design for the fashion, beauty, lifestyle, interiors, food and drink industries.

In our final episode of the year the tables are turned as David Davies, Ascential's Chief Content Officer quizzes WGSN CEO Carla Buzasi on her high and lowlights of the year. They discuss the innovations Carla was most proud of and what kept her and the wider WGSN team going through the past 12 months.

The holiday season this year is going to be an incredibly complex one. People are dealing with restrictions on movement and gathering while still looking to find moments of joy and connection after an incredibly difficult year. It goes without saying that the holiday season this year will be fundamentally different and companies hoping to win in this season will be required to adapt their conventional thinking.

Cities are locations which take up and outsized space in our imaginations. They are places that ambitious and creative young people aspire to go to in order to succeed and find their place in the world. Perceptions about cities in the wake of the pandemic have changed. The forecasts that deemphasize a physical presence in city offices are creating space for new visions of the city to emerge, ones that build towards a more humane sustainable and equitable future.

This week WGSN CEO Carla Buzasi is joined by Andrea Bell, WGSN's Director of Insight. Over the course of the conversation they discuss the impact of the pandemic on consumer behaviour, both this year and into the future, what that means for brands and businesses and how the design industry has to change as a consequence.

One of the places where we have seen some of the largest shifts over the past year has been in the home. Once a place where we might have just slept, it's now the centre of our worlds, becoming a place where we live, educate, eat, work and if we're lucky, have a little bit of time left to play. While attitudes to space are changing, so too are the lifestyles around that space. This week Petah Marian is joined by the Lifestyle and Interiors team ahead of the product's new launch on November 2nd.