Services
Color Design, Trend Forecasting, and Merchandising Direction
Color dominates first impressions and highly influences our connection to a brand, product, environment, and experience. Trends show how lifestyles and culture are evolving, forecasting what will be meaningful to people in the future.
Color and trend strategy is crucial because it elevates a brand's positioning and recognition, their impact and appeal, their revenue, and the strength of their emotional connection with their community. It provides a purposeful, attuned vision based on the shared values between a brand and the people it serves, and creates the vital link between a brand's goals and their future success.
Here is how I can help you with your color and trend strategy:
Color Design
Color design creates the visual language that communicates your brand’s character and culture. Color is the first opportunity you have to speak to consumers. Done right, it generates an emotional, visceral response that leads to engagement. Color dictates consumers’ perception of your brand, their purchasing decisions, their loyalty, and their level of connection to your product or service.
Color design includes: color strategy; color palette design; color roadmaps; and building brand-specific color stories and language.
Trend forecasting is a window into the future heart and mind of your customers. It looks at the influences, challenges, and cultural shifts relevant to your brand and product space, connecting the dots from what is happening globally to what matters most for your consumers and your business. This client-specific guidance is distilled into actionable direction, initiatives, and stories. Trend forecasts are designed to deliver what is most valuable to you.
Trend forecasting includes: in-depth, comprehensive presentations that outline the influences, innovations, and inspiration driving seasonal macro trends; high-level insights on key trends; seasonal color-specific forecasts; ideation on how a brand can integrate relevant trends.
Merchandising
Merchandising brings it all together. It provides the framework for how color will be applied across categories and assortments. Successful merchandising plans balance newness, sustainability, and consumer expectations with business goals, retail concerns, and economic indicators.
Merchandising includes: detailed merchandising plans outlining color usage across an entire product line; visual line plans; individual color CADs; active participation throughout the seasonal design and development process.
What Sets Me Apart
Diverse Expertise
Throughout my career, I have worked with Fortune 500 companies to start-ups in various industries, product categories, and geographies. Usually, at the same time. My point-of-view is rooted in understanding the intricacies of a range of approaches, philosophies, structures, and budgets.
Strategic Thinking
Color and trend touches more than design. It influences the functionality and success of multiple systems across a business – planning, operations, marketing, sales, customer experience. Any project I work on considers the complete impact of a creative strategy.
Strong Relationships
Open collaboration that invites curiosity, communication, and innovation is my preferred way to work. Building trust, honoring commitments, and surpassing standard expectations are key principles in my approach. I have worked with most of my clients for multiple years, and the majority of my new partnerships are from word of mouth or past clients with roles in new companies.