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To find new business opportunities or new product ideas for our clients during the beginning phases of a design project, we need to conduct a trend research. It is not only good inspiration for new ideas, but also an important part of the strategic planning process. The main goal of doing a trend study is to try to identify how a specific trend developed over time, and how it may potentially develop in the future, so while doing research it is very important for designers to keep questioning themselves - how do developments in certain fields relate to each other? How do trends influence the strategies our clients choose to pursue? Where are the potential opportunities? And, most importantly, what developments can we expect in coming years, and which ideas for new products or services can we conceive, when bearing in mind these potential trend changes?

When the printer is running non-stop, and when all the walls in the office are more colorful than autumn leaves and you see designers spending hours staring at them, you know they are most likely doing some sort of trend study. WILDDESIGN senior designer Yingting Chen says that, while doing trend research it is very important to pay attention to how you collect the relevant information. Printing everything out and sticking it on the walls is the best way to see everything clearly, and it's the easiest for filtering out unnecessary ideas. "When I do trend research," Yingting says, "I always remember those movies about Sherlock Holmes and Alfred Hitchcock. When doing an investigation they stick their prime suspects' photos on a wall and are trying to link up all the crime details. Doing a trend study is almost the same - you try to link everything together, and find 'the suspect' - a potential future trend."

Our clients come to us asking for trend research, because they understand that only moving with trends, not against them, will create real value for them. One of the companies that we worked with on a trend research is Geberit - a world leader in sanitary technology. You can find a case study of how WILDDESIGN did a trend analysis on how to extend Gebertit's product portfolio with additional colors to complement the existing black and white, while creating graphic patterns attractive to the Chinese consumer here.