We look to the future and let the past speak for itself. We are experimental but research driven. We bring human context to big data. We are evidence-based but brutally open-minded.
We listen and listen and listen.
We listen and listen and listen.
DeeDee helps clients to learn about their consumers’ environment and culture and re-envision the future of their businesses. Using her Applied Futures Thinking™ approach, she brings forward-facing consumer insight and trend analysis to her clients’ growth challenges, focusing on the development of new products, services, delivery systems and markets. DeeDee has impacted almost every business sector, for a diverse range of top-tier clients including Disney, A24, Porsche, Bayer and Nike.
DeeDee Gordon is a recognized expert and thought leader in macro trends, consumer behavior and disruptive innovation with over 25 years of studies, publications, entrepreneurial projects and client engagements. Her clients span a wide range of industries, with work on iconic brands like Disney, Coca-Cola, Calvin Klein, Nike, Porsche and Bayer. DeeDee’s process for criteria-based trend identification separates signal from noise, and her techniques for visualizing future scenarios provide detailed inputs for opportunity framing and concept development. As founder and head of The Gordon Co., DeeDee brings her behavioral insights, trends identification and future visualization skills together in a single discipline: Applied Futures Thinking™. She employs this across a portfolio of disruptive, paradigm-challenging tools and techniques. The Gordon Co. builds on DeeDee’s long history of innovation: In the 1990s, DeeDee created The L Report, the first publication to track trend diffusion in youth culture. She also founded Look-Look, the first online platform that let people report on their own culture. Look-Look evolved into a custom marketing agency and the first user-generated arts magazine. Both are now academic case studies.
Recognizing a need for precision and respondent quality in the nascent online research industry, DeeDee then founded the-Collaboratory, a personally vetted online database of consumers, mavens and experts that provides input for a broad range of diverse projects.
She was also Innovation President of Sterling Brands, an award-winning branding and design agency, where she published On The Future, a trends report with Futurecast scenarios of potential future products and services. DeeDee expanded the agency’s offering in areas of new product development and end-to-end innovation.
DeeDee’s work is featured in many articles, textbooks and case studies, and in a broad range of media, like Fast Company, Vogue, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The New York Times, NPR, PBS Frontline and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
Stephanie leads our client services, helping to define their needs and spec out our work to maximize impact. As an institutional stockbroker for HSBC, Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder and Wedbush Morgan, she developed a passion for learning about what makes some businesses succeed and others fail. She’s brought this expertise to established clients like 20th Century Fox and Playboy, and to challenger brands like Another Tomorrow and Dropbox.
Sara heads up our research department, defining the optimal method for each project and working with agency partners to ensure representativeness, accuracy and efficiency. With a Ph.D. in Social Research Methodology, teaching experience at UCLA and USC, and extensive experience in both the private and public sectors, Sara has a deep understanding of multiple qualitative and quantitative techniques. Her clients have included major players such as Toyota, MTV, VISA, Anheuser Busch, Calvin Klein and CNN.
Debbie Millman brings her unparalleled experience to select Gordon Co projects – she has worked on the design and strategy of over 200 of the world’s largest brands. She is host of the award-winning podcast Design Matters, one of the world’s first and longest running podcasts; Chair of the first ever Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts, Editorial Director of PrintMag.com, and the author of seven books on design and branding. Debbie’s most recent book, Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People, will be published by Harper Collins in 2022.
