King of cool
easyJet magazine
Published on Wednesday November 1, 2006
Serial entrepreneur Reinier Evers loves searching for cool new ideas. But while most business people keep their ideas to themselves, Evers makes his money by sharing – leading the industry in commercial trendspotting. Chris Alden reports
It was July 2001, and the dotcom crash was cutting its swathe through the world of business, but Dutchman Reinier Evers had just become one of the lucky ones. He had sold his online food delivery company, Urbanbite, to Lastminute.com, and immediately began looking for the next idea to put his money into. But he was soon to discover that when you’re a born entrepreneur, one idea is never enough.
As a former strategy director at a new media agency, Evers already had experience in watching how consumers behaved; now every day seemed to bring a potential new business. He toyed with setting up an ad agency in China, an Innocent-style drinks company, even a restaurant chain devoted to selling healthy fast food. “I spotted so many new ideas, and so many trends, that I thought, ‘why not start a company devoted to them?’”
From that idea Evers, 35, has become a leader in the growing army of “trendspotters” – people who keep a permanent watch on the world of business and beyond to keep innovators one step ahead of the market.
Evers’ two sites, Trendwatching.com and Springwise.com, are two of the best-known of their kind online. For those who haven’t come across them, Springwise is the site to watch if you love seeing new business ideas in action. The site, which relies on a network of thousands of online spotters, features the world’s most bloggable business ideas, such as carbon offsetting by SMS, designer barcodes, and the Belgian catering company that offers dinner parties suspended from a crane.
Trendwatching, on the other hand, features Evers’ idiosyncratic take on the business trends that the wired world is leading us into. The site is heavy on jargon, but even if they don’t recognise the words themselves, the chances are that every modern business person has encountered “minipreneurs”, “counter-Googling”, and “innovation overload” – all terms Evers has coined (see glossary for more).
And because there are millions of niche blogs out there tracking the latest developments from gadgets to fashion to food, there’s a never-ending supply of trends to watch. “We like to say that right now trends are the new trends,” he says. “Everybody’s obsessed with tracking what’s happening – and you can. All the information, the observation, it’s all out there.”
Of course, future-watching is hardly new. Since the days of crystal balls and headscarves, people have made money trying to predict the future; analysts, marketers, journalists, bookmakers and weathermen all profit from predicting what tomorrow will bring. The difference is that, by harnessing the internet, Evers has made money by making his trends work for him.
His first success was in persuading a network of “spotters” to be his eyes and ears, while keeping a tiny payroll: Evers has only five staff in his Amsterdam office, with a similar number of freelancers on the books. Instead his spotters – often students – sign up at Springspotters.com and send in their tips in return for points, which are redeemable for gifts.
Never has the word “surfing” seemed more appropriate for an online activity. To get the tips that make the trends, Evers rides a virtual wave of 9,000 other internet users. “We have so many people contributing that more and more of the work we’re doing is really collecting and interpreting,” says Evers. “The actual spotting is being done for us.”
In addition, Evers employs researchers who read RSS feeds (live updated website content) – probably the fastest way of digesting online information – from blogs and online news sites. “Within that phenomenon, the fact that everyone and anyone is now publishing in English, from non-English-speaking countries, is incredible,” he says.
Evers’ second important step was to distinguish himself from much of the rest of the business-focused “future-watching” market by putting most of his content online for free. In this way, Evers has built his brand sufficiently to exploit a number of revenue streams – from seminars to speaking engagements – while relying on word-of-mouth marketing.
Of course the internet is not short of “cool-hunters” – bloggers or entrepreneurs who’ll post tips on lifestyle, fashion and technology, and usually publish for free. So just as Evers has cleverly distinguished himself from the big money future watching agencies, he has also differentiated himself from the online competition by adopting a more professional approach. It’s a delicate balance, and while Evers states that “we’ll always have loads of free stuff,” he says he is looking at ways of selling a subscription-based service – what he calls a “virtual trend unit” – to serious corporate trendwatchers.
So what future is there for trendwatching? Evers is aware that, as with all trends, there’s no guarantee that the market will last forever – due to the sheer numbers of people doing it.
As a result, he is thinking about ways to make his site the first choice for trendwatchers – either by having the definitive archive of business trends, or to be first with every trend’s scoop. In this way, he becomes more of a media service, a proposition made attractive by the fact that one of the biggest fashion trendwatching websites, WGSN, was bought last October by publisher and broadcaster Emap for £140m (€207m).
Evers also sees a future in what he calls “uber-trends”. “My prediction is, and it might be a nice little side project, that one day somebody will take all the different content from all the different trends firms, and have just one uber-trends site. Can you have a framework of all trends that matter, and as a company just print it out on a massive sheet and put it on the wall – and use that as your starting point to innovate?”
Ever the entrepreneur, Evers knows that if he gets distracted from trendwatching, it’ll be for the same reason that he fell into it. “The other thing we’re working on is starting small companies that are trends-inspired, but not trends-related,” he says. “That’s a nice way of saying that we’re seeing so many cool ideas that we’re going to do a few of our own.”
The world according to trendwatching.com
Innovation overload: The realisation that there are so many innovative ideas out there that you just can’t keep track.
*Counter-Googlin*g: The practice of an organisation researching its clients and customers on Google. Three million or so bloggers, plus the recent boom in Myspace users means there’s an awful lot of personal information out there.
Minipreneurs: Small and micro businesses, freelancers, side-businesses, weekend entrepreneurs, web-driven entrepreneurs, part-timers, free agents, cottage businesses, seniorpreneurs, co-creators, mompreneurs, pro-ams, solopreneurs, eBay traders, advertising-sponsored bloggers. The world is full of them.
Infolust: That feeling you get when you just can’t resist switching on your computer and researching something, however arcane. Remember, your customers do it too.
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