More Analysis Shows Bad News For Old School Trend Companies

Phil Leif is a young entrepreneur who is in the planning stage of a what could be a very cool fashion/web venture. While he was doing some research to gauge the relevance
of certain entities from a grassroots marketing standpoint, he noticed
something interesting: he claims that WGSN, Trendstop, and all of the other big trend firms are pretty much irrelevant to the blogosphere.

Using a technorati-based index he compared PSFK and Trendwatching with established firms and this was his reaction:

"It’s shocking how miserable the these supposedly tuned-in companies are at maintaining any online cache. I’d say that it’s because they haven’t caught up to the fact that trend information is fast becoming a commodity. To paraphrase Umair, this stuff is finally getting digitized and soon it will all be networked. The cost of this information is dropping. Quickly. WGSN et al are enjoying the grace period where their clients are realizing
that trend information is important, but still don’t have very many
authoritative sources for it."

He says some very nice things about PSFK, but then again (and for the sake of transparency) we did buy him a few pints when he was in NYC the other day (’being nice’ is the trend for 2006 we think ;).

Phil Leif’s Analysis Of Trend Companies

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