“The most expensive spy is always cheaper than the poorest army”

Today we had a very interesting guest lecturer, her name was Kristina Cheng and she works as a professional trend spotter. It was very interesting to hear her thoughts about trend spotting and her work. Her presentation itself was very interesting, but I think it was the questions afterwards that interested me the most. One interesting question was when a guy asked her how she finds the trends. Her answer to that was that she reads a lot of books, she travels a lot, goes to a lot of restaurant, but the most important thing is not just to gather information but to convert it to something that a specific company can use. When you can do that you will get your clients, just predicting trends is not that useful but the second that you can convert them you will be successful.

The second question was about what she tells her clients when she finishes her reports, does she tell the client that this is going to happen or does she tell them this, or that might happen. To answer that she said that she gives them the information and for it to be a trend the company has to go at it, or sometimes they won’t go at it and it stills become a trend or sometimes they go at it and it doesn´t become a trend. The important thing is that the company has to make an important choice and that is choose if they are going to believe the report they have in their hands and to decide if they should go at it, and hopefully in most cases, maybe go all in. She also pointed out that this work is a lot about stomach knowledge. You can never know for sure what´s going to happen in the future, but you can do what you can to predict it and combine that with stomach knowledge and you will get Kristina’s work.

You could tell that Kristina enjoyed her work and I must say it sounded like a very fun and interesting job. So who knows, maybe in a couple of years I work on my own trend spotting firm……