Surveying Local Consignment Store Anna Bananas on Digital Marketing and Trend Cycles

    Hello all!

 While working on this project, I began to think of how I could incorporate the opinions of people in our local community. While thick, academic literature can be a great way to explain the rhyme behind the reason, I believe that thin, more tangible, human anecdotes can speak more truth due to general relatability. Essentially, I would rather ask someone's personal experience and how said experience impacted them rather than consult a book that feels to only offer large words and ‘objective truths’.     

     With this foresight, I thought it would be a good idea to ask the opinions of some of the most fashionable and internet savvy locals I know; my coworkers at local consignment store Anna Bananas.

    At Anna Bananas, it is essentially our job to track trends, post them, and then style ourselves and our mannequins accordingly. Of course, we want to look like we know what's in the loop, and oftentimes, by the sole nature of our job, we are. In my experience, customers come to us to ask about what's hot and what's not, and expect their retail experience to be a reflection of that. 

    A consignment store is oftentimes a local business where community members can sell their unwanted clothing for a fraction of their retail price. At Anna Bananas, we sort clothing based on how well we expect them to sell, and donate the clothing we don’t think will do well in store.    

    This puts consignment into an interesting corner of the trend market, it feels counterintuitive for people to shop in a store filled with unwanted, perhaps by proxy, ‘untrendy’ clothing. Working here has changed my perception of what is seen as trendy, and how quickly the trend cycle seems to reset. 

    In relation to the topic of my project: We track the many different digital identities represented through fashion, and use that to catalyze our marketing to our (mainly) Gen-Z audience. 

The questions I chose to ask relate to: 

• Fast fashion and sustainability

• Digital impacts on consignment

• Trend perception

• Local community 

• Celebrity

I will update this blog with my findings, and intend to do further research on the topics covered in the survey!