WE DID IT – our Autumn Winter Christmas book for 22/23 is ready!

It’s a huge undertaking under normal circumstances already – collecting information from all over the world, sorting and analyzing this info, distilling the trends and composing the books. This time we were not able to travel (only a little bit) but with the joint forces of our team that now almost covers the entire globe and all of its continents, we managed anyway and it turned out great. The world is not the same as it was before Covid and people are anticipating the fact that when all the dust has settled there will be a new reality. Sales channels are changing (mostly towards online), trade fairs are changing (mostly towards online) and human needs are changing from mere consumption to well-being and balance. Knowledge is power and markets in turmoil can be bad or create more new opportunities than ones in rest. Let’s focus on the latter and there indeed are possibilities. New products to develop, new customers to address and new ways to do this. This time we didn’t merely focus on new colors, prints, materials and products but also used the information we came across to help you use the circumstances.

We found out that already for some time the buyers and producers are careful and more than once an order places is a re-order of something that has been ordered sometime before. This completely understandable but the end consumer is more demanding than ever. They have time to roam the web and socials and come across new creatives with fresh ideas and they want that. Puzzles for example have experienced a gigantic development over a very short time. Last year around this time there was a shortage of these time consuming gadgets, shelves were empty and this triggers creative people to get well... Creative. In no time 3d puzzles were created and sold online and new generation puzzles made of transparent acrylic (without an image, so you really had to focus on the shape of the piece) and paper puzzles which featured an only white or red surface with very tiny pieces became hot. This is just one example of Covid creativity but there are more and they are interesting.

We have organized our books a little different this time and have used the 2 concepts of long term trends or market directions and short term trends. The first group is for example the focus on youth and products that are related to younger media like Insta and Tik Tok. We have discovered that for quite some seasons now there is a very basic direction which people keep on coming back to and we identified 4 more. Within these directions of long term trends there are short term trends or changing behaviors. We have identified the most important ones and made them as clear as possible. This new set up also acknowledges the more careful buying and producing behavior but on the other hand doesn’t leave out the latest, most interesting and most commercial trends.

The book is called ANTIDOTE and we sincerely hope that the world receives the greatly anticipated cure/ vaccination to Covid as soon as possible. And on a much smaller scale that our book can assist in getting our business going again.