Someone once asked Jo Feeley how many trends start in Newcastle. It was meant as a reason to leave. Move to London. Move to New York. Go where the future happens.

Jo's answer, built over 26 years of forecasting trends for some of the world's biggest brands, is that the question itself is the problem. A forecast that only works in Shoreditch tells you more about the forecaster than the future.

I sat down with Jo recently to talk about her career, her new book Trend Leader, and what it actually takes to see the future clearly. What came through was a conversation about whose lives get designed for, and whose don't.

The Clothes Show

Jo grew up in a tiny village outside Hexham. A handful of children in her school year. No proximity to fashion, no obvious route into creative industries, no one around her doing that kind of work.

Her first encounter with fashion as a world that existed beyond wearing clothes was watching The Clothes Show on television, aged about ten. Before that, the closest thing was the Laura Ashley catalogue her mum used to get delivered, which Jo would cut up and rearrange into patterns.

She was a daydreamer, imaginative, creative in ways that didn't show up in the standard markers. She wasn't good at drawing, so she was never picked out in art class. When drawing is the main marker a school checks for, children like Jo get missed.

It wasn't until A-levels that a teacher suggested fashion might be a career. Jo hadn't realised that people did fashion as a job. She thought it was something that was consumed, not produced. She applied to Kingston University, one of the best fashion courses in the country, thinking there would be no harm in trying. She was amazed when she got in.

She got there because a single teacher saw something in a self-confessed daydreamer that the system had no way of spotting.

Grant Money and Pancakes

At Kingston, international talent scouts would arrive at the end of each degree programme to handpick graduates for brands around the world. Jo wasn't confident she'd be among those selected. So she and a friend used their grant money to buy flights to New York, slept on the floor of friends who'd gone out the year before, and went to meet a recruitment agent.

The agent got them interviews. Jo went for the menswear team at American Eagle Outfitters. Her friend went for womenswear. They both walked out with jobs.

What followed was plain pasta with tomato ketchup, and a New York that sounded, when Jo described it, a lot like the one I'd watched on television. "Midweek nights out, we'd stay out really late, get up, get showered, go to work completely normal, and do a full day's work the next day."

Listening to her, I kept thinking of Carrie Bradshaw: the Manhattan apartment, the cocktails, the late nights that never seemed to dent the next morning. Except Jo's version ran on a student grant rather than a column in the New York Star, and the shoes came from a menswear design job rather than Manolo Blahnik. Then there was a Christmas Day spent alone eating pancakes in a diner while families gathered around her. She was in her early twenties and an ocean away from Hexham.

Jo tells these stories lightly, and not as hardship. They matter because nobody had marked her out for any of it.

The Instinct Problem

After New York, after heading up trends at Tesco, Jo came back to the North East and built Trend Bible from Newcastle. Twenty-six years into her career, the agency she built forecasts the future of life at home for some of the world's largest brands. Pet products, toys and games, interiors, lifestyle. Their work reaches boardrooms across continents.

The question people kept asking was why she'd build a trend agency from Newcastle. What they meant was, how can you see the future from there?

She told me that people often ask whether she uses instinct in her work. She does, but she will never lean on instinct alone. Because instinct, as she put it, is "your experience reflected back at you." Instinct feels like expertise earned through years of pattern-spotting. But if your experience is narrow, your instinct is narrow too. You end up forecasting a future that looks like your past, designed for people who look like you, living in places that look like yours.

This is why Trend Bible uses trend panels: groups of people with lived experience of the topic being forecast. If the report is about future home life from an accessibility viewpoint, people who live with disability are in the room. If the company serves consumers across multiple countries, the research reflects that range. A forecast from Trend Bible is never created only by the people inside Trend Bible. If a trend report for the top ten toy and game brands doesn't show children of different genders and skin colours, all it does is embed the biases that already exist. The agency has built systems, checklists, and frameworks to catch its own blind spots before a report goes live.

It's the same problem Claire Malcolm described when she talked about whose stories get published: a narrow geography producing work for a narrow audience, and calling it universal. Publishing loses the voices that never reach the page. Forecasting loses the lives nobody designs for, which is harder to spot because nothing visibly goes missing.

From Shoreditch to Shields Road

Trend Bible's office used to be in Ouseburn. The nearest high street was Shields Road in Byker. And that geography gave Jo a phrase that became the company's internal test for whether a trend is real.

Jo told me that for the brands Trend Bible works with, mass market means 70% of the population. On her working model, that means the most directional early adopters, then an early majority of around 36%, then a late majority of another 36%. Many of her competitors, based in Shoreditch and similar, were only interested in the front end of a trend. The first weak signal. They weren't interested in whether that trend had traction beyond the postcode where they spotted it.

So Trend Bible coined the phrase: from Shoreditch to Shields Road.

A trend has to make that full distance. If you can spot it in an architecture studio in east London but you can't find it on the shelves at Morrisons on Shields Road, it hasn't reached the people it needs to reach.

The Stanley Test

Take the Stanley cup. The oversized stainless steel water cups that have been everywhere for years, long past what anyone would call a fad.

The product sits on top of deeper layers: the hydration movement, the shift away from single-use plastics, the health and wellbeing culture underneath. Jo's reading goes one layer further. For the generation that adopted the Stanley cup most enthusiastically, fashion had been static for years. Grey jersey tracksuits, minimal variation, very little room to show who you were. So identity moved to other objects. Nail art. Wired earphones. A cup you carry everywhere. Things that sit on the body and say something, without being clothes.

If you're a competitor to Stanley, the instinct is to ask how your cup compares to their cup. The better question is what the brand tapped into that people feel compelled to attach part of their identity to and why. Asking the wrong question starts in the forecasting, long before the product. And it happens when the people doing the forecasting can't see past their own postcode.

What We Design Without

I see the same mechanism at Citizens Advice Gateshead. Every benefits process carries a picture of the person claiming it, and that picture belongs to whoever designed it.

Last year our Research and Campaigns team looked at what happens to terminally ill people claiming Universal Credit. One man, under hospice care and largely bedbound, was told to attend the Jobcentre in person to verify his identity. When his representative rang the helpline on his behalf, with authorisation already recorded in his journal, the helpline refused to speak to them. The fast-track for these claims used to take around ten days. Our team found it now takes up to thirteen weeks.

Our Research and Campaigns team called that report Cruelty by Design. The design in question assumed a claimant who can travel, speak for themselves, wait, and in some cases look for work. The people who don't fit the picture get handled as exceptions, and there are a great many of them.

Jo's trend panels exist to stop that picture forming unchallenged. Her clients pay for a forecast that holds from Shoreditch to Shields Road. Our clients are living with the forecasts that didn't.

In the full episode, Jo and I also talked about the difference between trend forecasting and foresight, why she thinks the current AI hype may be overblown, and the sensory design movement that's starting to reshape how new homes are built.

Choosing to See It From Here

Jo Feeley had every reason to build her company somewhere else. London would have been easier. New York, where she'd already lived and worked, would have made commercial sense. Her professional contacts in London thought she was insane for trying to make it work from Newcastle. She was asked, to her face, how many trends start here.

It's a running joke in her family that she has made a whole career out of cut and stick. The girl cutting up her mum's old Laura Ashley catalogues in a village near Hexham is now the woman the world's biggest brands pay to show them what they can't yet foresee.

Until next time, 

Alison