Direction
Trend Prediction and Forecasting
Market research and forward direction, so a design room is choosing cloth for the season it is building toward rather than the one it just finished, styled and presented as a collection a team can react to.
Reading the market before the fabric is chosen
A fabric decision made a year ahead of a garment shipping is, by definition, a bet on where taste is heading. Getting that bet closer to right is what the research work is for: watching what is moving through the mill portfolios first, where colour and hand are trending across the collections coming out of Italy and Europe, and where American design rooms are already starting to ask questions before the market has fully caught up with them. None of that replaces a design room's own point of view. It gives that point of view something to react against.
From direction to a presented collection
Forecasting on its own is a set of opinions. What makes it usable is the same styling and presentation discipline that runs through the rest of the studio's work, turning direction into an actual body of fabric a design team can walk into a line review with, organised the way a collection is organised rather than the way a spreadsheet is organised. That is deliberate. A forecast that cannot be handled, felt and compared on a table is not much use to a room that still has to choose.
Renovazio has run forecasting and direction for brands including Ralph Lauren, Elie Tahari, Calvin Klein, Theory, Bebe and Brooks Brothers. Call (212) 764-2890.
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Renovazio has kept Seneca's line as its own working motto since 2005. Applied to forecasting, it reads plainly enough: the collections that look prescient a year later are rarely the product of a single good guess, they are the product of a room that had already done the preparation when the opportunity showed up.
Direction feeds the rest of the studio
Forecasting sets the questions that sourcing and mill representation then have to answer with actual cloth.