A few months ago I watchED a 20/20 report about David Lehre. This was a story about a 21 year old guy who didn’t get a part in the high school play and with decided to make his own movies with a few friends.

He got a video camera and started to shoot. He didn’t just share the movies with his friends at school, he shared the movies with the world by posting them online. They went on to make a movie about Myspace that got them lots of attention and networks started to call him to find out how he was making these movies and what funding they had. When Lehre shared that each movie costed about 100$ bucks to make, the executives where shocked. He had a meeting with an executive at Fox who gave him carte blanche to put together his own show. David Lehre summarized what was going on perfectly: There are hundreds of channels on TV with nothing for me to watch so I am going to create a show that I would like and there are many people like me who will like it as well. How can some executive understand what our generation wants?

http://www.davidlehre.com/ The 20/20 report http://www.davidlehre.com/html/wordpress/?p=18

That sentence really touched on lots of lifestyle trends that we have been noticing which all add up to the same basic premise; no one knows better what the consumer wants then the consumer himself! Especially the young generation which is seemingly impossible to understand! So this new generation is creating for themselves. We already talked about all the hand made trends which are a part of this larger trend that we are calling Brand me.

This also explains the success of websites such as Threadless.com whom we heard have just been bought over. The concept of Threadless was to give people the opportunity to create their own T-shirt with art they created. Then the designs would be rated and the top 10 would be sold to the public. We track the top designs on Threadless because there are lots of new trends starting there all the time. Another great site is called www.etsy.com that is the 'ebay' for hand made stuff. You can spend hours going through incredible creations that people are selling and buying.

So what does this mean to us designers?

If this new creative consumer is doing it all on their own then why do they need us?

I won't be shutting our doors any time soon because for as many creative people there are like David Lehre and the people posting stuff on Etsy and Threadless, there are many, many more out there who are still looking to buy the latest trends at retail. Face it, we don't all have time to make a wardrobe!

What's really shifting is who is setting the trends. In the past it was the leading retailers and designers; now it's the consumers themselves. What we need to do is track these outlets for upcoming trends. These are the people who are starting and creating trends since they know what they want. On these sites its easy to track if people pick up on the trends or not, so it is an ideal style lab! We will keep you posted on what we find that is newsworthy on the pages of these and other BRAND ME sites!