Arts and Crafts Design Trends
As an artist or crafter, how important is it to keep up with design trends?
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Unless you create unique products with a style or trend of their own (for example, you might focus exclusively on 50's designs) you would benefit from following trends.
If you sell your crafts you're definitely going to have an edge if your products fit in with the season's styles, and design trends also help generate fresh ideas for new products - whether you simply reinvent an existing product in new colors, or create something completely new.
What are the real benefits? More sales of course! How?
Many craft items are essentially "accessories". Cushions and other soft furnishings are decor accessories in a living room or bedroom; jewelry or a handbag is an accessory for clothing; and people buy accessories all the time. Not everybody can afford to redecorate an entire room to suit each new season's design trends, but if the basics are in place it doesn't cost a lot to get the season's look with a few new accessories. Ditto for fashion - you could have a dress from last year, but you can get the hottest new look just by adding the season's latest design trends with accessories like jewelry.
Stationery and gifting craft items also benefit from new design trends. For example, if you've just bought your friend a funky necklace for her birthday, wouldn't it be great to get a greeting card that's similar in design?
The thing is, how do you keep up with and know what the latest design trends are?
You could of course simply browse through the stores at your local mall and you'll see a prevailing theme, or tune into the the fashion channel for the latest updates. The problem though, is that by the time the merchandise has hit the stores it's already too late - what you need to do is find out what next season's trends are so that you can start planning, preparing and creating in advance.
This information is not that easy to come by. Retailers pay exorbitant amounts of money to trend forecasters for this privilege, so they're not going to simply announce it to Joe Public. But there are other ways, here are a few tips:
Go out and grab yourself a few fashion and home decor magazines. Trawl through them (without drooling if you can) and pinpoint the ones who do give you an inside peek into next season's design trends. This may seem like an obvious thing to do, but the fact is that the mags usually concentrate on what's hot now, so you need to find the few that will regularly have info relevant to the future trends, and not just the present.
If you happen to know someone who is a retail buyer, is there a possibility that person would share some of the seasonal design trend info with you? Take note of the word possibility here - retail buyers are usually only authorized to share this information with their suppliers not other outside parties, so don't put the person you know at any risk with their employer if you think that asking about it will cause problems.
An obvious thing to do would be to search the internet, however, I've tried and the results weren't anything worth writing home about. If you happen to come across an interesting source, that's great, bookmark it.
Remember, you want your products to sell, and all too often a new design that grabs the attention of a consumer, generates an emotional response that leads to a purchase - so get on out there and find the hottest new design trends for next season!