Need to Know
22 : 05 : 18

New York – Furniture brand Kamarq has launched a subscription service for people seeking flexibility from their furniture and home décor.

Users can subscribe to a selection of packages that last between six and 12 months, and range in price from £3.70 ($5, €4.26) to £13.40 ($18, €15.30) per month. This entitles customers to order new furniture in line with their subscription period that they can later exchange when they want to refresh the colour or style. While allowing customers to quickly update their interiors with bold and versatile designs, Kamarq is also acknowledging the importance of the circular economy, repairing and reviving worn pieces before putting them back into the rental programme rather than making new designs.

Despite its recent launch with a campaign created by fashion designer Nicola Formichetti and Belgian creative PJ Mattan,the company faced plagiarism accusations relating to a number of table designs that echoed pieces by designer Ana Kras for furniture gallery and manufacturer Matter. The collection was removed from Kamarq’s offer.

At a time when consumers are openly sharing and renting products, it is crucial for brands to create systems that provide high-quality and value-driven experiences for customers. For more, see our macrotrend The New Value Economy.

US – Clothing label Universal Standard is driving a new narrative around inclusive fashion. Although it now caters for the plus-size market, the brand plans to expand its collections to serve women of smaller sizes, expanding its range to serve sizes 6–40, with plans to later offer sizes 0–40.

‘The future of fashion is one in which women of all sizes can participate equally, and we’ve designed our clothes accordingly. Our end game is to be at the forefront of the movement that will make size an irrelevant consideration for women when making style choices. It’s about fashion freedom,’ explains Polina Veksler, co-founder of Universal Standard.

The brand’s approach to clothing engineering and pattern-cutting has contributed to its successful size extension. Using an approach known as micrograding, the brand is able to adapt the numeric formulas of each garment to fit different body sizes but in a similar way. This enables Universal Standard to demonstrate a more realistic representation of clothing on each individual body type, akin to ASOS’s use of AR to show how items fit on different body shapes.

Global – Creative agency Superimpose Studio’s latest concept project, Emoticash, envisages how alternative data currencies will be used to reward consumers for providing real-time brand feedback.

The project uses emotional detection and recognition (EDR) technology to record and interpret users’ emotional responses to a brand’s products or services, offering participants something tangible in exchange for the raw data relating to their emotional feedback. Users can spend their Emoticash on wellbeing activities such as yoga sessions and gong baths.

‘Emoticash raises interesting questions about the intersections of effect and consumption. As audience responses and engagement become increasingly vital to brands in the digital age, Emoticash poses the question of how much a brand would be willing to pay in exchange for unfiltered insight into how they are perceived,’ Superimpose Studio said in a statement.

As explored in The Emotional Economy, people are increasingly obsessed with how everything makes them feel. Although emotions are difficult to quantify, measuring feelings opens up new possibilities for brands to create products and experiences personalised to customers.

A recent survey conducted by private network service ExpressVPN found that a sizeable majority of US consumers are concerned about how brands are handling their online data privacy and security. The research discovered that 55% of consumers are particularly worried about their conversations being monitored by smart home devices. Another 45% are wary of performing banking and financial transactions online.

Recent data scandals involving brands and service providers have heightened privacy and security concerns among consumers. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect in Europe on 25 May 2018, discover whether your brand is ready for GDPR here.