Trends Report

In March 2016, I agreed to be a contributor to a trends report put out by the (then) Craft and Hobby Association Designer Section for my area of expertise, kids crafts. I submitted my report last summer, well ahead of the fall 2016 publication date. It came back with a request to make major cuts to shorten it to about 2/3 of the original word count I'd been told. With great reluctance, I made the edits. Fall came and went without it being published. I learned that the association was compiling its own huge trends report, so the smaller one done by just one section of the association was not going to be published ahead of it. Good grief.

In January 2017, the Craft and Hobby Association became the Association for Creative Industries and I was told that our trends report would indeed be published, but it needed to be rewritten to incorporate the new name and branding. Then I didn't hear anything more. When June 2017 rolled around, I'd assumed the report we'd written would never see the light of day, as trends is an inherently time-sensitive topic.

Well, I assumed wrong. The AFCI Designer Section Trends Report, written in the summer of 2016, was published last week. My report is one page of a 34 page document.

Fortunately for me, trends don't move as quickly in kids crafts as they do in the adult crafting world, so my report is not ridiculously out-of-date. Thank goodness. If you'd like to read the whole report, it really is quite interesting. It probably isn't as useful as it would have been last fall, but it's still worth a read.