Trends before they Trend

Can data predict the next big consumer trend?

In this episode of Data Talks, Wolfgang Fengler speaks with Yarden Horwitz, Co-Founder of Spate, about the science of spotting trends before they go mainstream.

Drawing on her experience at Google and building one of the fastest-growing trend intelligence platforms, Yarden explains how brands can use search, social, and behavioral data to understand what consumers want next. From beauty and wellness trends to generational shifts and artificial intelligence, this conversation explores how data reveals emerging opportunities long before they appear in the headlines.

Yarden shares lessons from building a startup through Y Combinator, discusses why trends like press-on nails and longevity treatments have endured, and explains why the future of AI is not about replacing humans—but helping them tell better stories with data.

A fascinating discussion for anyone interested in consumer behavior, innovation, marketing, and the future of insights.

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Data Talks is produced by World Data Lab, bringing global data to life through insights, conversations, and stories that matter.

Transcript

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Welcome everybody to a new episode of Data Talks. This is a really cool one. You'll enjoy it. I'm here with Jordan Horwitz, co-founder of Spate, an icon in the rising beauty tech industry, and somebody with a great background in data, data science, and the future, I would say. Welcome to the show, Jordan. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be part of this. Well, same here. For the viewers that don't know, we have actually worked on a number of projects together, including on Gen Z, which we'll dive deep in a minute. Before that, I want to uh, Yardan, have the viewers understand a bit your own genesis and background and what drove you to co-found Space because you had a distinguished career at Google. And um tell us about that part and how that shaped you, but also why did you leave Google for Space? Yeah, great questions. Um yeah, my career at Google was um, it began as an analyst. So I was an analyst on the sales teams helping them. Uh the sales teams would, of course, pitch their clients to sell more media ads, and their clients wanted data on just like how to, you know, launch ads. But I would come in and do a bit more of an analysis on what their consumer was thinking, how their consumer was thinking about their brand, how their brand was performing with the consumers based on consumer behavior, how consumers were searching or how they were interacting on YouTube. And in doing that, really realize that you can gather so much insight just from this, these data points. And so you can see, oh, actually, consumers are not aware of your brand, or consumers are aware of your brand, but they're thinking about you like X, Y, Z, you know, and maybe you don't want to position yourself like that. So maybe you should, you know, change your positioning and create ads that target or position yourselves in a different way. And in doing that, um, this was early days in Google advertising and YouTube advertising. So people didn't quite even imagine that you could have that much control or that much um of a storytelling nature in Google advertising, you know. Um it was the beginning of all of that, of all online advertising, and people didn't weren't as creative back then with it. And so we were blowing a lot of minds with that type of data, and we realized that there's so much insight you can gather from consumer behavior and search. And we, um, my co-founder and I, so Olivier and I um started looking at uh trends, so just looking at category data. Um we started in the fashion world and we did our first uh Google Fashion Trends Report. It was purely a little hobby of ours. You know, we were doing it weekends, evenings, and we launched it in 2015. It got picked up by the New York Times, so it was the front cover of the business section, and it just blew up. Um brands were reaching out, they wanted more of this data, they wanted to understand how they could get ahead of the next big trend, and so it became our full-time role. We um started launching other reports like Beauty Trends Report. Um, we did beverage, food, skincare, hair care, and we even got into auto trends. So, seeing what automotive trends were taking off, we did a whole story on that. And every time we'd release one of these reports, we'd get so much demand for more data, and we realized how big the opportunity was. So we left in 2018 to pursue it a bit further. Um, we got into Y Combinator, so we did Y Combinator in the summer of 2018, and that gave us like a little boot camp on how to run a startup. And then we were we came back to New York after that and we were off to the races. Congratulations. Wow. Uh tell us a bit about the you know Y Combinator and Post Story. Is it you're just growing and then tell us about the you know the new phases of growth and how how you run the operation, or tell us a bit about the early startup years and and where you are now? Yeah, yeah, of course. So Y Combinator is definitely such a whirlwind. It's an incredible experience. I highly recommend it to everyone. But if you can get in, it's it really just it really is a boot camp. They um the focus is just to launch, just launch, launch, launch. You should launch on day one, you should get things out ASAP. The faster you get things to the market, the faster, faster you get things to consumers and clients, the better the feedback is, the faster you can iterate, and the faster you can get to a product that actually has market fit. And so we um we worked our butts off for a full summer. Um, and you know, it obviously doesn't end then. We got uh funding in uh from demo day at Y Combinator. So we got um funding from Alexis O'Hanian, Gary Tan, their fund called Initialize. Um Alexis O'Hanian is co-vander of Reddit, Gary Tan is um now uh he runs Y Combinator actually. And so um they've just been amazing investors, amazing advisors, really helped us um push through at the beginning. We got in with L'Oreal, Estee Lauder from the beginning. We had great contacts through our network at um during our Google days, and then also when we left, we um we got really in with a community called CW, um so cosmetic executive women. They um we did uh presentations with them on some trends in the beauty space. So um state of the industry, we were showing, we were presenting with Google on what trends were taking off. And what was so fascinating, at the end of the day, we were just saying what the data was telling us, and the data ended up hitting the mark every time. And I mean, I'm not surprised, I don't think you'd be surprised either, but um data uh you know tells the truth, and um we were able to spot trends that nobody was talking about, and so these trends just kept proving themselves correct, and we were the ones talking about these new up-and-coming trends before anyone else, and that was able to get us more and more attention, more media credibility, and we were just able to appear in more places, and uh we, you know, a lot of our attraction is still completely inbound. We do a lot of organic marketing in a way, like we we don't really spend too much on marketing or advertising. Wow, fascinating, and congrats again, um Jordan. And I hope the young other, even younger you know, our founders out there find that uh as an inspiration. But it's always hard work, I guess. That would it's very few startups that don't. Yeah, it's it's always hard work, and then the work doesn't stop. Um you continue to iterate and the market continues to move and things continue to change, and you have to continue to keep up with everything. You just mentioned, Yardan, that the there's you were able to spot trends that others didn't see yet. Um give us a few ex uh you know illustrations of some of those trends, maybe from various stages of of uh spate, including recent ones, which are some of the trends you'd like to showcase to the audience. Yeah, um so some of the trends I'm trying to think of 2018. I know even in 2019, a trend that took off that we had mentioned in one of our presentations, and it just continues to grow, which is so fascinating, is press on nails. And the whole concept of artificial nails um has just really we were the first to mention it in 2019. We did an article with um Vogue Business then, and I'm sure we were talking about it even before that article came out. And press on nails continue to grow strong. Um, it's completely transformed a whole industry, and it has um gained so much traction with consumers, and people go to Etsy, they go to Amazon to buy press on nails, and um new brands have stemmed out of it and seen a ton of success. And uh that was one area that I I just saw recently is still trending, and um you know, things like what even freckle pens, like I think what's so fascinating is that the trends are moving so quickly, and there are so many trends. We've seen that with TikTok, and everyone, you know, kind of less about trends, how fast-paced Gen Z is, but at the end of the day, the trends really do stick around. And a lot of these trends that we called out back in 2019 are still around stronger than ever today, and just continue to come in different iterations or different styles and remarketed in new ways. Um so it really shows that you can find these fast-paced trends and you have to act on them from a language perspective to keep up. But sometimes, but a lot of the times these trends are actually sticking around, and if you invest in them, they can really be meaningful for your business. Interesting that you said that it wasn't actually where press or nails. That's an interesting one. And you were the one uh that uh that that saw it, but also as you say, that's a trend that's sustained, right? Because I imagine to separate the trend from the fad or the uh noise from the signal. Um and and to give you an example, we had here actually cr I don't know if you know this, crusty slices. It's really cool. It's like pizza with cross or mixed, and a long cue outside the restaurant, but now it's over. Now it seems to have been a fat. So how do you separate uh the fat from the trend? Yeah, I mean, I think we definitely so the whole thing about spade is that we're quantifying the data so that you can easily um track how it's growing and see if it's um a rising star or a sustained riser is what we call it. And rising star trends or trends that are seeing really, really strong growth in a short amount of time. These are riskier. But a lot of sustained sustained risers start off as rising stars. And so, for example, even something like turmeric, when we first spotted it, it was a rising star. But then it continued to grow and became sustained over time. So it, you know, it tends to be a bit of a risky decision at the beginning. You don't know if it's here to stay or not. There are signals though. So one signal is um how people are searching for things, um, how people are engaging with the trend. Often when they just learn about a trend, they'll ask something like, What is what is press on nails? I mean, they know what press on nails are, but let's say what is turmeric. Um, so that's how it starts. It's always turmeric, or what is turmeric? And that's how you know the consumer is still in the education phase. Once consumer starts to say um benefits of turmeric, they're still engaging, they're researching, they're interested. Then they start to associate real benefits. So they'll do turmeric and acne, turmeric and heartburn, turmeric and teeth whitening, you know, like things like that. Consumers will search for anything and everything. And that's kind of when you know that you've hit something interesting. Because the second consumers start uh taking a trend and um associating it with multiple types of benefits, multiple types of formats, that's when you understand that's when you've like identified something that has legs and is here to stay. Super cool, Yardan. Um, as you just highlighted, I think a lot from people can relate to the Google search. And uh, if I understand correctly, you combine Google search, Facebook, TikTok, maybe other sources. Tell the viewers a bit, you know, at a high level, how the machine works. Yeah, great question. So we um we obviously started off with Google, especially when we were at Google, we were looking at Google data, and then when we left, we brought in um TikTok data. TikTok was taking off during the pandemic. It just all the trends were coming from there. Everything that we were seeing that was trending on Google was coming from TikTok, so we realized we needed to embrace TikTok data as well. Um we added in TikTok data, and now we also have Instagram data, and also we just launched Reddit data. And so all these different signals um come together to tell the bigger story. And I think what um even what you were touching on, this idea of um understanding if a trend is here to stay or not, it also has to be cross-platform. And so we've launched a stat or a metric called the Popularity Index from Spate, and this measures how a trend is doing across all platforms combined. And so something like Google, for example, we have seen decline in search overall. And so if something's declining on Google, it doesn't mean that it's not trending. It just means that like Google searches overall have declined. And so what we do is we normalize for platform behavior. And so similarly, everything on TikTok is trending because TikTok is just trendy, and so we normalize um for the growth on TikTok so that just because something's growing, um, it may not be trending, but we then normalize to identify what is actually trending on TikTok. And so we bring all the signals together to identify what's trending overall, and then we can see, okay, this is a trend. So to your earlier question of okay, how do we know if something's here to stay? Um, there's ways of looking at those context clues that I mentioned, but then there's also ways of looking at how is it performing across other platforms? And if it's seeing growth across all the different platforms, then you can also feel more confident that this trend is here to stay. And uh can you share with the viewers, Yard, and a bit of how the signals from the platforms are different, right? There's different demographics, the different types of people on the platform. Obviously, some like like you and your team are across all of them. But give us a feel of of, you know, are there some the the the top, how you call them? The the nails again? Do you see this across all the platforms or is that different or and give us other okay that that's a great question. I do think um I do think different platform consumers engage with different platforms differently. But I do think there's also a bit of a misconception that certain demographics aren't on certain platforms. And so we get this a lot about older uh, you know, in the beauty wellness industry, um, a lot of brands are trying to target women and they're trying to target older women. And um they think that TikTok's not right for that. But the brands who are going after these demographics on TikTok are the ones that are winning because there are women across and men across all ages on all of these different platforms, and figuring out how they're engaging and being the brand to stand out and to show up there is how you can win with this audience. Because, for example, an audience like Gen X Women, they're a little under they have been underserved on TikTok. You know, TikTok, a lot of the brands come onto TikTok and they're trying to just target Gen Z, Gen Alpha. But uh there's a whole opportunity of older women um that are looking to engage and they don't want to just engage with teeny bopper trends. They want their own trends, they want their own audience. And um, so we've seen influencers and we've seen brands really take off. So brands like Laura Geller has seen a ton of success just um positioning themselves alongside the mature skin trend on TikTok. It's brilliant you say this because that's something I wanted to touch on, which is generations. Um and you know, the way we met is because of the Gen Z report. Um and then we also did one Gen X report with Nielsen, which uh is my generation. I think you are a young millennial, if I'm not uh mistaken, uh Jagan. I think uh and yeah, and I'm like which side of the millennial sphere, but yes, I'm I'm a millennial. Uh millennial and uh Gen X have about the same amount of money, 15 trillion in our estimate. Gen Z has way less money, but gets a lot of emphasis in obviously in advertisement and in the space you're operating. And there have been various theories. Some say they're just over index, it's just more fad, not a reality with the money. Others say that the kids influence their parents. Just give us your perspective on marketing and reactions and brand positioning across the generations. Yeah, I think from the TikTok perspective, I do think that the older generations are seeing all the younger generation generations behave and you know um what they're engaging with on TikTok. So, I mean, for myself even, but um even as we were mentioning with Gen X, a lot of the trends that they're seeing are what the kids are doing on TikTok, and so they are engaging with it, and that's why there is such an interesting perspective to bring in stuff that's specific to them so that they don't have to just play with the kids in a sense, you know, like they can find their own trends, and I think um that's just where the opportunity really does lie. Uh I yeah, I think um not everything works in that same um perspective though, because you can you can try a trend that a younger person is trying to engage with it, um especially in the beauty world, it might just not have the same impact. And so that's why there are all these influencers that show how things work for mature skin, because um, for example, you know, like a certain blush, you can't apply it the same way that a 20-year-old will apply it. Or the way 20-year-olds are talking about retinal and lasers and things like that, it's like they don't really need it. So um so they're not talking about it in the same way that an older audience might need to. One thing I want to touch on, Yardan, is also some of the global um footprint of um of your industry and how you spot global trends or trends elsewhere. Um can you give us a few illustrations of where some trends spark in some regions and not in others, or when then also something obviously may have not happened in the US, but then comes, you know, spills over elsewhere. Obviously, TikTok itself is an example where where it originated from elsewhere. But yeah, give us a sense, is the more similarity or more difference across the world, say within demographics, in terms of what we can talk about? Yeah, no, that's such a great question. Um we're seeing, I mean, it's no surprise, but Korean beauty has obviously had such a big impact. Um, trends like PDRN are trends that we spotted in the Korean data set first, and now we're seeing in the US. Um, and you know, it comes out as uh PDRN serums, PDRN face masks, all the trends now are PDRN related. And so yeah, if you look at Korean data, for example, you can really see what will take off in the US soon enough. Um I think what what are trends that have taken off elsewhere and not, you know, I think the world is a lot more global than we than we expected to be. Um a lot of the trends and like even lip, um, I remember lip was taking off so strongly in the US during the pandemic, and then we started to see similar lip trends take off in the UK. Um, I think the UK, I want to say, were more heavily into the plump lip um than the US. Like I think it subsided in the US, and the US went more for like lip liners, lip liner stains, and so on. But I need to confirm that. I need to double check the data. My memory's fading a bit with that. That's super cool, Yarden. Before we move to AI, uh obviously what fascinates me still is the the that you know the various trends that you spotted, including the press on nails. For the audience, what what drove that press on nails uh pick off what takeoff? What what what's your interpretation why that took off? Yeah, that's a good question. So press on nails were trending before um the pandemic. So it wasn't because a lot of trends have taken off, a lot of ingredient trends, a lot of beauty trends started to pick up um during the uh when people were at home. They were researching everything, they were um trying to understand what would work on their skin, they were testing stuff on their skin, and then they'd have breakouts, and it just led into this crazy cycle. But when we talk about press on nails, that was before um the pandemic. So actually, I have to say that it was likely related to just a typical cycle, and now we're hitting that cycle again. So we'll see. That's why I'm even more surprised that press on nails is continuing to trend because we are getting to a point where um consumers are starting to be interested in just playing nails again, and um, there are a lot of brands coming out and targeting um just wearing your nails in a naked way, um, just buffing your nails, taking care of your nails, and so on, in hand care. And I think um that's just a typical trend cycle that we follow, and you'll see that also start to happen with makeup. So we went through a very strong skincare phase, and consumers were very focused on face, not putting on too much makeup. Um, 2016 is like the era that we think of when we think of like a lot of makeup, and now we're starting to see that a lot of makeup trends are coming back, and consumers are starting to um be more interested in color on their face. And so I think it's just this transition, this typical trend cycle that we go do and go through, and seeing how um color kind of transfers from your face to your nails, and they go in this little cycle. Um And yeah, we'll see, we'll see how it continues to evolve because we are seeing consumers start to show interest in naked nails, but we maybe this time around colorful nails and press-on nails will continue to um take off. Super exciting. And maybe some viewers wonder now how, you know, how come you know Wolfgang and Yarden are are connected there because World Data Lab is not in that space. But there is obviously a connection because you spot the trends, and everybody who wants to make business to see trends that others don't see should go to spade. If you don't want to know how much money is in that space with which demographics, that that we can help with. And there's some some joint uh recent work uh in Yaran was recently in our panel on beauty futures as well. Um but with that, uh Yarden, I think we can move to AI. Well, I would just say quickly that um as much as we're talking about press-on nails, I would say the big trends right now are definitely longevity and all the different lasers and treatments that consumers are um exploring and PDRN, as I mentioned, and exosomes, it's all about longevity. Press on nails is a very small trend within this big um sphere of beauty and wellness. And um the trends, as I was mentioning before, there are trends coming coming and going every day, but looking at the data to see which ones are here to stay, um, things like exosomes and and PDRN and um definitely and scalp treatments and so on. The list goes on. And these are good bets to make in terms of trends here to stay, as you say. And um, and one simple reason is because you know, people just live longer, and wealthy people and healthy people live longer, and that's just a much longer life span economic lifespan as well for for the brands out there listening. And that's we work with many clients, and that's based exactly as you outline, Yarden. Um, Yarden, I think your spate, if I understand correctly, is also a product, a child of the AI era, or you are leveraging it, you're strong of AI. Tell us a bit how obviously a lot of happened since you launched, um, but maybe also share with the viewers why AI is your friend and not your enemy, or is it? Um so I I love AI. Um, there are definitely pros and cons and things that we have to be very responsible with when it comes to AI. But I think in the worlds of um data, we so we have always been an AI company. We leverage AI to um analyze patterns for us, analyze billions of signals across all these different platforms, and then help us identify what is trending up versus what is trending downwards. And we've always looked at pattern analysis to help us figure that out. And so AI has been a very, very good friend of ours in that in that aspect. And I think now with the rise of generative AI, um, there's a lot that can be um benefited from in the world of data, in the world of market research, where we're trying to um move quickly and bring stories together and understand um where the consumer is heading. And um, as you mentioned before, your funding round and your growth. And so imagine there's now a more challenging investor and would say, Yardan, no, this is super cool what you did, but actually a lot of this will be automated by AI. And so even further, what would be your response that even in five years from now, AI is your friend? Yeah, I think I think that's a great question. I think in five years from now, it's really hard to say what the world will look like. I think things are accelerating so quickly that um we like anything that it's not doing right now, it might be able to do in just a few months, you know. Um, but what I think is really helpful and where it really benefits is um the implementation of uh setting up processes and making teams more efficient, making things easier to find, um, and I think analyzing data in a way that uh makes your team stronger. And so I one thing that has been really interesting too with generative AI is this concept of um UX, right? Um everyone's using chat bots for everything, and you're able to speak to your data in a way that we haven't in the past. Um, I think that's really fascinating because it just means that you can um we all have different types of uh learning skills, you know, or um learning perspectives. Uh we like to read the somebody might like to read data, somebody might like to hear it, somebody might like to interact in a different way with it, and you might want to have a conversation with your data, you might want to see graphs. Um I think that's where AI can really benefit by um also helping people engage with data on different levels in different ways, ways that speak to them. I think communication with AI has been really, really interesting because uh communication seems to be the hardest part of anything in life, whether it's communicating in relationships, but also communicating even data. And um my career at Google was really in the the art of storytelling, and I think that continues on with Spade. It's not about um necessarily specific data points, it's more about what story is that data telling. And um leveraging AI to help us tell better stories that resonate with people in different ways, and making that more personalized and more engaging and more interactive, I think is a huge strength. This is uh super cool. You said it very nicely. Communicating is the biggest skill to have, and either with data or in with your partner, right? That was that was uh my summary of what you said. That's a very interesting frame of the garden. Um just on on this one though, um, just if again, it was interesting you said you can't really even five years are so far out. But if you think of yourself, your co-founder, others in your team, where where will humans still be needed in the next few years in your space? That's a great question. Um I personally, um, because I know everyone has different perspectives on where's the future heading. Um, I I love using AI at this time. Um I think a lot of people um don't really understand the true benefits yet. Um, I think that's fine. I think that it can be really hard to use sometimes. So it's very hard to get it to do the thing you want it to do. And I think people see it as like this magic tool where it's like, oh, I ask a question and I'm supposed to get exactly the answer. And if they don't get the answer, then they're like disappointed or they just think they like brush it off and say, oh, it's not good. Um, I think that's exactly where the human element comes in. I think we will always be needed to direct it, to manage it, to oversight, you know, um bring in human oversight to explore, um, to review what the data is saying or what the AI is saying about the data. Um I think we can use AI as a starting point, as a brainstorm partner, as a way to visualize things. But even if you are asking it to visualize something for you, you still need to double check it and make sure that it did everything correctly. Um, and so I think there's definitely a need for that human element. I don't think the human goes away because then we just have bots talking to bots, and I don't even know what that means. Like what world that's a little terrifying, where it's just like a lot of trust is put into um the machine, and machines break down just as humans do. And we, you know, that's why you don't typically have one human doing everything. You have people, you have systems in place to help each other support each other to make sure we're going in the right direction and um things don't break down. I think you very nicely and implicitly showcased also what the productivity gains will be if a human can multiply itself. And um, it's for a different topic, but uh also for the audience to be clear. My prediction actually is there's more jobs, not less jobs. Uh it's a bit counter to what others think, but I think you already touched on some of those. And some of these jobs also, we don't know how they will look like, but nobody would have thought there is a place like Spait or like influencers even 10, 20 years ago. So there'll be new new people that will be creative. Exactly. And I think I think the world continues to evolve, you know. I think there's been a lot of discussion around SaaS, and yes, I do think the SaaS market will continue to evolve, but I also think that new markets will become more prominent, like robotics and so on. Um, and there's always data and there's always the consumer, and there's always understanding consumer behavior and how um how it's shifting and understanding um what the implications are for brands. And yes, I think there's always a level of automation that we should be excited to explore and innovate with, um, but innovation always comes with struggle and iterating and learning and um and communicating. So Yaren, I think this is a very nice uh moment to uh switch to uh the end and the the this this the end question that I'm asking all of my guests, which is what's your favorite number or data point uh and what's the story behind it? My favorite, okay. So my favorite number is just I have to just say nine, and I know that's a boring, it's the my birthday month, so you know I'll uh I'll leave it at that boring answer. I I love nine though because it is a very beautiful number, I think. But maybe I'm just biased because I've always had that number as my favorite. Um but I um my favorite data point. I think my favorite data point would be um, let's say, I think 67% of all data points are are fake, is what I've heard. I don't know. I don't know if that's actually accurate. That's a fake stat. I don't know. Um, but uh I think the real point there is that in terms of data points, you can throw data points, you can throw numbers at people all you want. Any data point can mean anything. We've all seen the data. I'm sure you've gone in the weeds of data and you realize that data can always be, you know, manipulated, changed, one data point can mean one thing, but one data point can be an outlier. And I just think that a data point on its own is meaningless. But that's why it's important to bring multiple data points together to tell a real story and understand where things really are heading. Well, this is a brilliant way to end, Yarden, and just to build on this. Uh it's I'm strongly believe in that as well, that actually too often it's not the theory that's the problem, but the underlying numbers. And when the numbers are then clear and adjusted, then actually some of theories fall apart, but not because of inherent illogic in the three, but just the numbers were wrong, and just that emphasis on good data, as Spait is doing, is exactly where we should be head towards. Yeah, and it ties in also to that AI story, because I think a lot of the times we're gonna, well, we will see a lot of hallucinating when it comes to AI integration and data, and we'll see where that heads. But I think in general, uh status a stat. Um, it's more the story that is happening, the story, like what is the bigger picture, and making sure that you are tying in multiple data points so that if one data point's off, you know, you're you're at least getting the bigger picture correct, and you're onto something real, not based on one data signal that is hallucinated. It's a wonderful way to end this conversation. Jarjan Horvitz, co-founder of Spate and uh great entrepreneur. And I think you won a number of awards that people can check out. But thank you so much for being with us here, being with me on Data Talks. Thank you so much for having me. Chat soon. Bye.