How to Tell the Fashion Future? Warrick Page for the International Herald Tribune Julia Fowler, co-founder of Editd, a data-driven fashion forecasting company based in East London. LONDON - The fashion industry always wants to know about the next big thing, so Julia Fowler thinks it should take a closer look at the world's financial markets. Just as old-style traders have been all but replaced by analysts crunching vast amounts of data, Ms. Fowler said she believed that understanding fashion trends should be less about intuition and more about real or near-real time information. Trained as a designer, Ms. Fowler established the fashion forecasting business Editd in 2009 with Geoff Watts, a programmer with a background in financial modeling. "Industries like the financial sector have used big data for many years," she said. The logical step for us was to apply a scientific approach to the apparel industry. Editd has 22 employees at its office in the Silicon Roundabout, an area of East London now known as a hub for tech innovation. Each work day Editd's software gathers online information for a huge variety of garments and accessories and amasses 300,000 comments from social media ranging from what's on store racks to indications about how long the passion for leopard print will last. The information is transformed into data, compiled and repackaged into analyses that illustrate competitors" product assortments, pricing, consumer mood and emerging trends for clients that include Asos, Gap and Target. Editd's fees begin at $2,500 a month for a small retailer in a single market, but rise sharply for larger clients who want more complex services. For example, one customer wanted to know about biker jackets, the kind of fitted, waist-length outerwear that brings to mind James Dean, or Marlon Brando in "The Wild One." A report detailing sales at British and U.S. premium retailers over a three-month period shows Selfridges stocked the greatest variety (41 kinds), while McQ, Alexander McQueen's secondary line, was the most popular brand. It also indicates that just 3.1 percent of the jackets were marked down from their original price, and it took an average of just 28 days for a style to sell out - indications that the style has staying power. As recently as 20 years ago, forecasting came in the form of hefty books issued twice a year that detailed trendy colors, prints and silhouettes. When things moved online in the late 1990s, the books were replaced by sites like WGSN (Worth Global Style Network) and Stylesight. These subscription-based sites still dominate the sector today, offering vast quantities of information assembled by teams of forecasters: from how car shapes, architecture and nanotechnology will influence fashion in 2020 to the most popular width for stripes on next season's Breton top. Not surprisingly, some traditional forecasters are suspicious of a data-driven approach. "Right now data is the buzzword," said Isham Sardouk, chief creative officer at Stylesight in New York and once a design director at Victoria's Secret. But for me, data is not everything. It's just a portion of the information that's out there. I think that intuition is underrated, and when people think of a trend forecaster they imagine a crazy guy in a room experiencing visions of salmon pink. But it's a group decision. I have a team of 200 industry experts feeding information from all around the world. Looking at things as a calculated risk is part of the job, said Sarah Rutson, fashion director of Lane Crawford, which is expanding beyond its Hong Kong and Beijing stores to open in Shanghai in September. "A lot of the time it is about genuine gut instinct," she said. Maybe a trend didn't work before, but this time you know it is right for now. There might not be data to tell you what to do, but you just instinctively know it will be strong and it's absolutely worth the perceived risk to get behind it. Fashion is a multi-billion-dollar global industry that, at its heart, is based on creative egoists. Could that fundamental respect for the spark of genius be behind the reservations about analytics?