About TRENDEPENDENT

Image taken in Wales on August 15, 2025 at the Centennial of R.W.Hearst's purchase of St Donat's Castle, an event organized to examine and celebrate his impact on that building, the community it sits within and the future it breathed life into as a result.

My guiding force for the past decade has been to OBSERVE, INTERPRET and ACTIVATE the most current trends for business. The industry I was in at the time was the promotional products industry, having earned battle scars and brass stars designing in the mainstream retail world.

For a good share of my career I was an apparel designer, with occasional sanity breaks where I switched it up and worked in retail - behind the counter and on the floor. For one year, I even had the rare experience of selling the products that I had designed over the prior four years.

The perspective of that "on the floor" experience is an invaluable part of the design process itself. You are given a powerful telescope to observe clearly and in great detail how people interact with products. You personally observe how important it is for sales people to know the products they are selling. As the closest link between the product and the world, you see how important the sales person's observations can be to a brand and maybe even to the betterment of the design of a product.

As a designer of products, it was eye-opening to see in real-time, how packaging, buying, placement and marketing play as critical a role in the life of the item as the seminal design itself was in it's success or failure. Selling a product is like finally getting your telescope in focus. You finally see that the product is one star in the universe, it is not the sun, there is a vastness and complexity to the world beyond what you knew. Nothing is everything.

In the past year, I've taken another sanity break. Or, maybe it was a break from sanity? The last twelve months have been a roller coaster and I use that analogy with intention. I've been observing the world as if squeezed uncomfortably into a seat, holding on for dear life - by turns observing images rush by at an astonishing and unsafe speed and then hovering in a state of stasis, weightless, not sure if I will be able to manage the plunge to come.

I've come out of the ride finding myself happily OK and intact - even refreshed and clear minded. That is not to say that I know where I am going - exactly. But I do know that I remain the same person who has always wanted to have intelligent design around me, which is by definition, design that is co-equally beautiful and functional.

The best of intelligent design comes from nature and the best designers know that looking to nature is how we will be able to continue on this planet. Being observant and quiet enough to understand how plants, animals and the very universe that surrounds us works is my current critical mission. These learnings are the key to staying flexible and will allow us to adapt as the world around us changes.

The journey I am embarking on now is to explore the ways some exceptionally curious humans are listening to and learning from nature to create products, built environments and systems that will take us forward intelligently.

Come with me if you want, I am going on a wander with purpose. That's all I can say.