Trends affect every industry, art, photography, web design, graphic design, product design, fashion, lifestyle, home decor, and I'm just naming the visually creative ones. Having a solid understanding of consumer trends is absolutely vital in your brand's developments. They will be key to helping you succeed in business. If you want to strike commercial success with your artwork, designs, photography, or whatever you'll want to consider what has mass appeal for a large audience. And the best way to target this audience have an understanding of not just what your customers are into now, but what they're going to be demanding in the future. whether you realize it or not.
We all make purchasing decisions based on trends. There's that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep unleashes her epitaph on Anne Hathaway. It's when she's demonstrating that fashion isn't such an trivial thing and is insinuating that fashion doesn't really affect her and Meryl does something like pointing out that the blue sweater that Anna's wearing isn't just some offhand pick from her wardrobe. That's a really in blue sweater actually started with an Oscar de la Renta, a collection of civilian gowns, which sparked an onslaught of civilian blue. It infused itself into the fashion industry. And eventually that trend trickled down to some cheap wool sweater that and presumably fished out of the department store clearance then, anyway, Meryl Streep's point is that that blue wasn't chosen by Anne.
It was specifically selected for her by the trendsetters of the fashion industry and represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. Okay, so now they've got the rundown of Devil Wears Prada. I'm gonna move on. My point is that whether we realize it or not, trends have a massive reach. And if you know how to tap into that, you can hitch a ride on the coattails of fads that will earn you heaps of money for years to come. So now you To understand why getting in on a trend early matters, you have a much longer runway to be appealing to customers.
The earlier you get in on a trend, the longer you can milk it. All trends have a finite shelf time. So if you are lucky enough or strategic enough to tap into something, you're on the gravy train for months or years to come. For example, I painted these alpacas after a trip down to Peru. I painted them because surprise, I'm in South America, there's alpacas everywhere, and I wanted to kind of memorize them with watercolors. Think of it like a souvenir from my time down in Peru.
At this point, I was at the very beginning stages of my career as a commercial artist. So I didn't really realize what impact the single painting would have, but it absolutely blew up. Turns out alpacas were just beginning to hit the scene as an insanely popular motif. You were just starting to see them on home decor items, kitchenware, Walmart's the works and I was just done. lucky enough. to accidentally paint one of the hottest emerging trends of 2015.
The results. Those little packages earned me about 25% of my overall income for the next several years, they still earn me a great chunk of money and are in the top 10 of my entire portfolio of thousands of pieces of individual artwork. I have been able to ride this wave for years. And it's all because I got in at the exact right time. I started promoting and selling that artwork before the big peak of the alpacas trends, and by doing so, I beat out a lot of the competitors. By mid 2016 alpacas were everywhere, but because I was early to the game mine were noticed early on and I get a head start before everyone else.
This is what I mean about being an early adopter, you'll have the advantage of standing out and not getting your work lost in an overly saturated market. And this can give you a pretty hefty competitive advantage when you can correctly identify what's in and what's not, you will stay ahead of your competitors. Another selling point for being on top of trends, it will help you sell your ideas to clients. When I present boards to my clients, I like to back them up with cold hard strategic points. For example, if I'm sending a bunch of holiday concepts to a potential licensor, and I want them to carry these designs in their stores, I'll not only show them my artwork available for licensing, duh, but in some instances, I'll also include research on up and coming color palettes, motifs that are projected to become popular and the upcoming future or even art styles that may be making a resurgence.
These things are actually pretty easy to include in presentations. For example, I grabbed color palettes directly from New York Fashion Week, and it makes my pitch so much stronger when I'm not just presenting them with my ideas, but I can back them up with prodigy. Not only am I recommending this direction, but so are the market Researchers art might be subjective, but commercial art licensing is anything but when I show my clients that I know what I'm talking about, they trust my insights, respect my strategy and are ultimately more likely to buy in. Alright, so now that you understand the importance of trends, they're not so trivial. If you harness the power of popularity, you can cash in big time. Alright, let's move on to some of the concrete stuff how to actually track trends.