Sabrina Faramarzi
Consumer behaviour is moving faster than most planning cycles can absorb. Marketing, brand and innovation teams have more data than ever and less confidence about which signals to act on. The hard question is not what is trending; it is which shifts are durable enough to redesign a product, a category or a customer experience around.
Sabrina Faramarzi is a journalist and trend analyst who helps brand, marketing and innovation teams turn cultural and consumer signals into industry-specific decisions about where to build next.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Sabrina Faramarzi
- She has written trend reports for The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8, three of the most-used forecasting houses in consumer strategy, so brand teams get a forecaster who knows how the foresight industry actually works inside.
- Her sector range covers travel, beauty, fashion, food and drink, wellbeing, money, tech, retail and media, which means a single speaker can address an audience drawn from several consumer-facing categories without losing specificity.
- She runs Are We Europe, a cross-border editorial operation, so she brings a pan-European read on culture and audience behaviour rather than a default Anglo-American lens.
- Her data storytelling practice through Dust in Translation is built for organisations that have research and data assets but cannot make them land with a non-technical audience.
Biography highlights
- Managing Director, Are We Europe, a non-profit pan-European media collective.
- Founder and Editorial Director, Dust in Translation, a creative data storytelling agency.
- Co-founder, Feminist Internet, a non-profit advancing internet equality through creative practice.
- Trend reports written for The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8.
- Journalism contributions to The Guardian, Wired, Vice and Vogue Business.
- BA (Hons) First Class in Trend Prediction and Forecasting, University of East London; MA with Distinction in Journalism, University of the Arts London.
Biography
Most consumer trend conversations in the boardroom collapse into one of two failure modes. They either treat every TikTok spike as a strategic shift, or they ignore weak signals until a competitor has already built around them. Sabrina Faramarzi works in the gap between those two errors. Her practice is reading consumer and cultural signals well enough to tell a brand team which ones to bet on.
She has the technical training for it. A First Class degree in Trend Prediction and Forecasting from the University of East London, an MA with Distinction in Journalism from the University of the Arts London, and a working track record writing trend reports for The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8. That is the inside of the foresight industry, not a commentator’s view of it.
The journalism work runs alongside the forecasting. Bylines in The Guardian, Wired, Vice and Vogue Business cover gender, AI, digital rights and internet culture, and that editorial muscle is what lets her translate research into stories that boards and marketing teams actually use. Through Dust in Translation, her data storytelling agency, she does the same job for organisations sitting on data they cannot make legible.
She also runs Are We Europe, a non-profit pan-European media collective, and co-founded Feminist Internet. Both give her something most trend speakers do not have: a structural view of how cultural narratives form and travel across borders, which is the part of trend work that matters most when a category is being reshaped rather than refreshed.
Key speaking topics
- Consumer trend forecasting
- Data storytelling
- Internet culture and online communities
- Futures of consumer-facing industries
- Gender, AI and digital ethics
- Cross-border European media and audiences
Ideal for
- CMOs, brand directors and category leads in consumer-facing businesses planning the next 18 to 36 months.
- Innovation and insights teams looking for an outside read on which signals to commit to.
- Communications and content leaders who need research and data turned into audience-ready stories.
- Conferences in travel, hospitality, beauty, fashion, food and drink, retail and media that want a sector-specific futures keynote.
Audience outcomes
- A clearer sense of which consumer signals in their category are durable and which are noise.
- Working language for telling stories with data so research lands with non-technical audiences.
- A sharper read on how online communities form, mobilise and shape brand reputation.
- Sector-specific cues for where to look for the next category shift in travel, beauty, fashion, food, retail or media.
Talks
A custom-built keynote that walks an audience through the medium-term futures of their specific consumer-facing category, drawing on her trend reporting work with The Future Laboratory, Stylus and Canvas8.
Key takeaways:
- A read on the durable shifts shaping the chosen category over the next two to three years.
- Specific weak signals worth tracking, with reasoning rather than headlines.
- A framework for separating cultural noise from category-defining change.
A practical session on turning research and data assets into narratives that non-technical audiences act on.
Key takeaways:
- Why most data communications fail before the first chart appears.
- How to choose the story shape that matches the dataset.
- Working examples of data storytelling done by editorial newsrooms and brand teams.
A short-form session on how internet communities form, hold attention and convert it into action, drawn from her journalism on internet culture.
Key takeaways:
- The structural shift from audiences to communities and what it changes for brands.
- How online communities police authenticity and what that means for brand presence.
- Practical signals that a community is mobilising, before the metrics catch up.
A keynote on working with uncertainty as a planning input rather than an obstacle, framed for leaders making medium-term commitments.
Key takeaways:
- Why forecasting confidence is usually a warning sign.
- Practical habits for making decisions when the picture is incomplete.
- How forecasters actually hedge, and what that looks like inside a planning cycle.
A session on the journalistic discipline of questioning, applied to research, strategy and leadership work.
Key takeaways:
- Why most strategy questions fail at the framing stage.
- A practical method drawn from interview craft, adapted for research and planning.
- How question quality compounds inside teams over time.