Trends today move faster than ever. And being able to jump on a trend the moment — or, better yet, before — it becomes popular is fashion’s Holy Grail.
But design, sampling and production are all time-consuming processes. So, how can a brand stay on top of trends, sort through the massive amounts of available social and sales data on trends, and make products that capture the zeitgeist?
Finding that answer is a mission of the American big-box retailer Target, under its incoming CEO, Michael Fiddelke. Fiddelke won’t officially take the role of CEO until February, but he is currently the chief operating officer, and the company has already begun implementing changes to its owned-brand business in line with his vision for the company. Fiddelke wants to compete with the likes of Walmart, and growing the owned-brand business is key to that goal.
“We’ve spent decades building and refining our industry-leading merchandising, trend, design and sourcing capabilities,” said Bill Foudy, svp and president of owned brands at Target. “And today, we’re leaning into new ways to move even faster to meet the high expectations consumers have for our brand.”
Jenny Breeden, Target’s svp of owned brand product design and packaging, walked Glossy through some of the new strategies the company has started adopting. She said there are three prongs to the strategy that has already led to as much as 80% faster turnaround time for new products year over year: predicting trends ahead of time, staging raw materials before they’re needed and using generative AI to analyze large amounts of training data.
“Speeding up the process meant we had to touch every part of our product development for our own brands,” Breeden said. “You don’t get to 80% faster turnarounds by making small changes here and there. It had to be all-encompassing.”
Sending team members on IRL scouting missions to locales where fashion trends are being shaped has been one new strategy. For example, Breeden said she and her team saw “a lot of energy from the European markets and alpine destinations” around winter and ski-inspired fashion on social media. Only weeks before the holiday season, Target sent owned-brand team members to some of those wintry European destinations to scout out what people were wearing on their ski trips.
“That helped [inspire] ideas early on in the process and led to a lot of different Fair Isle and furs in our assortment,” Breeden said. As a result of those trips, Fair Isle and fur have been prominently featured across Target brands such as Goodfellow and Cat & Jack this season.
These trips are common and include destinations like college campuses to find out what young people are looking for in the perfect hoodie.
The second strategy is about stocking up on trendy raw materials so that the team is ready to use them when the right trend comes along. Breeden pointed to a time this year when Target, anticipating printed jeans as a new trend, stocked up on denim earlier than usual. Then, when the leopard-print jeans trend began to emerge in October, Target was able to quickly print the denim it had on hand. Breeden said this strategy cut down on lead times for the style by 25%.
Often, this strategy uses materials that are guaranteed to be used in other products, avoiding the chance of having excess material that isn’t useful. For example, Target has recut excess material used to make its popular leggings into new silhouettes, like wide-leg yoga pants when that trend took off in autumn. Target said this has led to over $100 million in additional sales.
The last piece is around generative AI. Target has developed a new AI tool it calls Trend Brain, meant to pinpoint emerging trends. Much of the collecting of trend data is still done by real people — like during the aforementioned scouting trips — but it is now plugged into Trend Brain, which produces insights about the data in a matter of hours. Images, videos and social media posts go in, for example, and insights about common threads, colors and silhouettes come out.
Breeden said Target fed hundreds of datapoints from this February 2025’s fall fashion weeks in New York, Paris, Milan and London into Trend Brain, and gleaned an insight that berry would be a must-have color for fall 2025. The color was worked into several of Target’s owned brands.
Altogether, these changes are all about improving the speed to market for Target’s owned brands, which make up a significant chunk of the business. In the last fiscal year, owned brands accounted for approximately $31 billion of Target’s total revenue of over $106 billion.
