trend-forecasting
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af&co. knows a full dining room starts before dinner
The hospitality agency turns restaurant openings, hotel histories and local relationships into reasons to show up. Its most useful lesson: give people something specific to come for.
EDITED Turned Fashion's Hunches Into a 5-Billion-SKU Memory
A designer tired of guessing met a programmer who counted milk by the cow. Seventeen years later, their retail intelligence company says its AI can question 12 years of normalized data spanning 90,000 brands and more than 5 billion SKUs.
Datassential Built a Crystal Ball From 7.5 Billion Menu Items - Here’s What Food Brands Can Copy
The food industry used to test ideas by putting them on menus and hoping. Datassential built a cheaper rehearsal room - one where 25 years of menu history, consumer reactions and operator data can warn a brand before dinner gets expensive.
E.S. Sutton
E.S. Sutton is a New York-based global apparel sourcing and manufacturing company founded in 1959. Operating as a private-label specialist for women's and children's clothing, it works behind the scenes for many of retail's leading brands - handling trend forecasting, design, sourcing, quality assurance, and global logistics across manufacturing facilities in more than a dozen countries. Positioned as 'the brand behind your brand,' the firm builds and expands retail private labels by studying each partner's brand DNA.
Tastewise
Tastewise is an agentic AI platform built exclusively for the food and beverage industry. It combines proprietary consumer panels, market trackers, and trillions of real-time food signals with AI agents trained on food behavior to help brands spot trends earlier, validate new products, win retail and menu placement, and automate marketing and sales. Its tools are used by a large share of the world's leading F&B companies, including Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Kroger.
The Business of Fashion
The Business of Fashion (BoF) is a London-based global media and intelligence company covering the fashion, beauty and luxury industries. Founded by Imran Amed in 2007 as a blog written from his flat in Notting Hill, BoF has grown into an authoritative platform that combines agenda-setting journalism, paid professional memberships, data and advisory work through BoF Insights, online masterclasses, the BoF Careers job marketplace, and marquee events like BoF VOICES and the BoF 500. The Financial Times led its Series B round in 2019, and the company reaches readers and members in more than 200 countries.
Quid
Quid is an AI-powered consumer and market intelligence platform that reads billions of structured and unstructured data points - news, social posts, reviews, patents, forums - and turns them into business outcomes. Born from the 2020 merger of NetBase (social listening) and Quid Inc. (AI text analytics and network visualization), the company now sells a workflow platform (Q Platform) and a library of AI agents (Q Agents) so brands can see what's coming and decide what to do about it before competitors do.
Raspberry AI
Raspberry AI is a New York-based generative AI platform built specifically for fashion creatives. It turns sketches, text prompts and 3D files into retail-ready imagery - mood boards, lifestyle and product photography, on-body try-ons and technical drawings - in minutes rather than weeks, replacing the slow, sample-heavy design workflow that has defined apparel for decades. Founded by Cheryl Liu and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, it counts Under Armour, MCM Worldwide, Li & Fung and Gruppo Teddy among its customers.