2025 marks NellyRodi’s 40th year. To honor the event, we asked Vincent Grégoire, NellyRodi’s Consumer Trends and Insights Director and a key member of the team since the beginning, to look back at the important events of the last few decades.

I’m a child of the last century, and I started to work at NellyRodi at a time when the internet didn’t exist. Everything was different. Our work was artisanal; we created color ranges by hand, we cut out magazine pages, took them to the printer and glued it all on boards. We photographed store windows and visited malls to see what was happening, and we went to the telephone booth with our 1 franc coin.

The arrival of digital technology shook up how we worked and how we saw the world. It accelerated time and vastly increased available information. When I started with Nelly, things were clear: there was a theme and the main colors. We delivered a solid perspective every season.

Since the appearance of digital technology, we’ve been confronting a fragmentation of trends – they’ve become real mosaics! We went from one trend to two, then four … There’s a myriad of trends that appear, disappear or endure, all at the same time. Just look at TikTok, where everything is #core, which explains the importance of working with the mid, long and very short term.

The internet has created a completely different relationship to temporality and given a voice to another, very demanding generation with new points of view. In addition to needing to master these new technologies, the word “trend” has also evolved, becoming less niche, less privileged.

We are now face to face with climate change, and the consequences of our refusal to act are increasingly apparent. Before, we stalled for time, now the situation is urgent. For the first time in humanity’s history (though I wasn’t there during the Middle Ages), we have the impression that it’s possible to reach the end – of the world, nations, resources, brands … For the first time, we’re imagining that everything could stop, that the human race could disappear and that we need to think about living differently.

Until now, trends were ways to create desire, and now we must learn to consume differently through responsible consumption, alternative consumption, intelligent consumption, etc.

We need to take a new direction and set an example. In our professions, it’s our responsibility to sound the alarms and promote solutions. And CSR can help, as long as it performs well and is desirable.

I prefer desirable to sustainable, which has a punitive, coercive connotation. The idea of desirable makes us think of benefits and rewards. It’s celebratory, and consuming differently becomes a game!

I think that over the next few years, the three major issues, besides climate change, will be:

• The return of class struggles: demonizing each other, a shrinking middle class and the gap between the ultra-rich and the poorest.
• The shock of the new intelligences: the role of new technologies and the intelligences called “artificial” in our societies.
• Demographic imbalances: how we age, overpopulation issues, etc.

One thing is certain, the world will continue to evolve and we’ll continue to analyze the world and study consumer behavior!