Hi, welcome to PATTERN RECOGNITION
Glad you’re here. There’s a lot to talk about!
Who am I?
My name’s Beth Bentley and I’ve been watching consumer culture and growing consumer businesses for nearly 20 years.
I spend my life decoding, analysing and spotting patterns.
Hence the name of my Substack.
I used to run some of the world’s most respected brand-building agencies and consultancies (like Wieden + Kennedy, VICE), advising some of our generation’s most powerful-brands (like Nike, Google, Apple). Now I have my own strategy studio in Shoreditch called Tomorrowism. It helps businesses and investors across the global fashion system and beauty industry to navigate complex modern growth challenges + put their business on a solid growth footing.
Where am I?
Hackney, London. London Fields, specifically. The pic here was taken in the Tea Building in Shoreditch near where I live, where I do a lot of my work.
What do I write about?
Consumerism and hyper-consumption. How brands really grow. The aspiration economy. Status. Taste. Life under the algorithm. Why we want the things we want. How the trend cycle works. How things become popular. How thing stay popular.
I work hard to avoid making under-informed sweeping statements, and try to always interrogate my assumptions before sharing them…so you’ll sometimes see hard data linked from trusted sources, or quotes from books, articles, podcasts and links to research studies you can dig into if you want to go deeper. I don’t use affiliate links and will never (knowingly!) encourage you to buy stuff.
This isn’t dry business commentary.
And it isn’t really cultural commentary.
It’s something in between.
I want to help readers - and myself - have fun thinking a bit deeper about why we’re drawn to dress, shop and live in the ways we are.
It can be a bit daunting saying some of this stuff out loud, so I love it when people leave me comments or send messages. Every time I hit publish I’m wondering ‘maybe I’m the only one thinking this’ so it’s always a relief to know that…yeah nope, I’m def not.
Some most-read recent pieces:
