THE K BEAUTY SCIENCE is happy to announce the collaboration with SPATE. We will be providing beauty market trend reports. First, let us introduce to you what SPATE does and how SPATE reports can help you through this interview with the co-founders.
Brief company information:
Spate is an artificial intelligence platform created to discover emerging consumer trends. It was co-founded by Yarden Horwitz and Olivier Zimmer, both of whom have a background in trend analysis. Prior to launching Spate in 2018, Yarden worked at Google, specializing in data analysis, storytelling, and brand strategy for advertising clients. In 2015, Yarden and Olivier introduced the first Google Trends Report and later co-founded Google's trendspotting division. Their work identified trends such as turmeric, cold brew, and face masks before they gained widespread popularity. Yarden was recognized in 2016 as the Future Voice of Fashion by the Business of Fashion. She currently serves on the boards of Cosmetic Executive Women (CEW) and NewBeauty Brain Trust, prestigious organizations in the beauty industry. In 2022, Entrepreneur Magazine honored her as one of the most influential female leaders.
Olivier spent a decade at Google as a data scientist, leading the data science team in NYC. He holds degrees from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Solvay) and the University of California Berkeley. Both Yarden and Olivier are alumni of Y Combinator's incubator program (S18).
What drove you to co-found SPATE?
We first started using data to uncover trends as a side project at Google. Olivier and I were working with Google's top advertising clients to help them understand their digital presence, however, during that process we learned that they were going to physical store locations to see what consumers were purchasing (ie which products were sold out). Not only was this a very manual process, but it was also flawed — a shelf could be empty due to inventory issues. This sparked the idea to leverage Google data to determine what products/claims consumers were seeking and which brands were top of mind for them. We launched our first Google Trends Report in 2015, which was published in the New York Times and received hundreds of requests from brands across categories to launch more reports. It became our full-time roles at Google to deliver these reports across categories, in which we uncovered trends like cold brew, turmeric, and face masks. We left Google in 2018 to make this data more accessible to brands via the Spate dashboard.
How would you describe SPATE in a nutshell?
Spate was founded with the goal of creating a best-in-class consumer trends platform that made consumer trends data both accessible and actionable for brands in the consumer goods space. We began with a focus on beauty, followed by health and wellness. We have recently launched our food vertical, offering dashboard users yet another view of consumers’ lives. Spate really took off during the early days of COVID-19 when brands were trying to understand how to better serve their customers in a time of global uncertainty. Since then, over 180 brands including L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, Procter & Gamble, and Coty have come to rely on the insights they gather on the Spate platform from both search and TikTok for research and development, marketing strategies, communications, innovation, and social media.
How does SPATE analyses or methodologies differ from that of other competitors?
Spate uses big data sets (billions of Search and TikTok signals) to uncover new shifts in consumer behavior. Spate also leverages AI to analyze these big data sets, and organizes the data into insights on a self-serve, easy-to-use dashboard.
With a focus on digital consumer behavior, Spate provides insight into the pre-sale funnel — everything that leads the consumer to the final purchase. When looking at the marketing funnel, Spate focuses on the top and middle, or the awareness and intent portions. When consumers view a TikTok trend — one of the sources Spate tracks — they’re showing awareness. Once they take it one step further and type this trend into Google Search or Naver — Spate’s other data sources — to learn more, they’re demonstrating intent to purchase. Other market research firms that play in a similar space focus primarily on the bottom part of the funnel, which is purchases. It’s Spate’s goal to help brands predict what consumers want before they reach the purchase step. For this, we utilize AI and offer predictive data to show where a trend is headed.
What information can we get from SPATE dashboard and how does one use it?
The Spate dashboard analyzes over 20 billion search signals and 60 million TikTok videos to answer questions like: What is the next big trend? What does the competition look like? How to better position a product? What Spate offers not only is a look at the search queries themselves, but a proprietary easy-to-user interface and categorizations supported by artificial intelligence. Brands can look at the dashboard to understand which trends are fads and which are here to stay for better strategic planning. The modern consumer is very nuanced in their desires, and the Spate dashboard helps to streamline this picture for brands.
What drove SPATE to choose US, UK, France, Korea, and Japan markets?
As Spate grows, our goal is to continue expanding our horizons across new markets. UK and France offer Spate users a glimpse into these unique consumer bases with an added European perspective. Korea and Japan were another natural next step in our global expansion as US consumers look to these markets for innovative formulas and exciting textures. Following the launch of these international markets, Spate has since expanded into both TikTok and the food vertical. We aim to continually offer brands new lenses through which they can explore and understand consumers.
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