What trends will Popcorn predict for next year?

Although she is not a psychic, it's Faith Popcorn's job to predict the future.

With no supernatural abilities, Popcorn has successfully forecast upcoming trends year after year in the business industry and beyond. She opened her company, BrainReserve, in 1974, which consults companies on what consumers will want and need in the future. According to Popcorn, her abilities have had a remarkable 95 per cent accuracy rate. The following is what she has forecasted and has come true:

- S.U.V craze
- Organic food craze
- Cocooning (home deliveries, Home offices)
- Starbucks/caffeine craze
- Online dating
- Trophy wives

Corporations like Ford, Kraft, MasterCard and Wal-Mart have hired her.

She has published four books; “The Popcorn Report” (1990), “Clicking” (1997), “EVEolution” (2000) and “Dictionary of the Future” (2001). Her website, faithpopcorn.com, gives view a chance to see the predictions she made in previous years, dating only back to 2004.

Popcorn's predictions for 2007, according to her website:
- A person's net worth is no longer measured by dollars earned, but by improvements made.
- Respect for elders makes a comeback
- Socially responsible brands make a buck while providing desperately needed services. (example: Target daycare, Starbucks learning centres)
- Enviro-biographies are attached to just about everything (entire life story of a product)
- Savvy companies sponsor marketing-free white spaces in lieu of polluting the environment with models and logos.
- Chameleon-like brands focus less on communicating a static message and more on being the right thing for the right persona at the right time.
- Reject the singularly defined roles we're expected to play in society, (dress up in various ‘costumes' depending on who they feel like being that day).

What does she have to do with fashion? Fashion is a business where everything is done at least six months in advance. Fashion is not just clothing and accessories. It represents what is going on in every present era/ year. Knowing what is going to be the next “hot” trend/style can make a lot of designer's and business jobs easier. We, as the “customers,' make the fashion trends, the designers don't. As much as you think designers make fashion, the customers are the ones who hold the power and accept or reject a style.

The fashion buyer (the person who buys all the clothing/ products for that store) may be smart and ‘in' with the fashion predications, but they still must serve the consumers of that specific store, and if the customers don't like it they won't buy it. As fashion designers try to predict what next fashion fad is, it is entirely up to you because fashion is always moving forward and changing.