Trend & Market Research: Home Summer Cover Story
About the project: Every season, we launch a Walmart home "cover story" which features a curation of home furniture, decor, kitchenware, & more to fit with the hottest trends in the market.
Question to answer:
What is the home style trend that will connect deeply with customers for the Summer of 2021?
The first step to predicting what style trend we should pursue for our summer cover story in 2021 was doing a deep dive on global furniture and decor trends. To do so,
I leveraged customer data surveys conducted through industry publications like porch.com, LA times, Google. This was the year after we were struck by a global pandemic, so there were significant changes in how people and manufacturers were thinking about home designs.
I then broke this down into 8 key features that would inform our own cover story curation and aesthetic.
Next, I had to look at how this trend would exist within our editorial calendar. This calendar is inclusive of retail insights i.e. which businesses pick up during this time of year? With longer, sunnier days, are they spending more of their time outdoors? What holidays are taking place?
The next step was to analyze other trend indicators including Pinterest Trends, SEO searches, the Pantone color of the year, and fashion indicators. I also took a look at what we had seen from competitors in the past for these seasons and what they had evolved into for the spring season. Comp shopping and Milled were great tools for this.
I then summarized all of the data into a brief overview of our summer trend: Citrus Summer. This would then be used as a messaging framework across influencer, owned, and paid marketing.
