Trend Alert! Raw Milk, Luxe Travel, and Knitting

On a recent Thursday afternoon, some core personnel of the Office of Applied Strategy, a newish consulting firm, met at Casetta, a wine bar on the Lower East Side, to do some trend forecasting. In attendance were Tony Wang, a former McKinsey analyst; Chris Gayomali, a former GQ editor; Joyce Matos, who is undertaking a Ph.D. in media at Brown; Chloé Desaulles, a computational artist; Helen Yin Chen, a former staffer in the office of Biden’s Surgeon General; and Victoria Massey, a fashion model. Coats were shed, and summaries of holiday travels and bits of media gossip were shared as the group placed orders for herbal teas, double cappuccinos, and affogatos. Matos, who knitted throughout the meeting, worried aloud that her handshake was too stiff. Chen agreed: “A little bit like a politician’s.”

They jumped right in. Raw milk and luxury fashion: out. Luxury travel and Ozempic: in. Wang, the founder of the firm, was all in black. (He used to live in Berlin.) He tapped his iPhone, pulling up his notes. “I was telling Joyce that I had a crazy, unhinged epiphany,” he said. The firm issues white papers, which it calls Dossiers, and he said that he wanted the next one—its second—to focus on wellness and work: “I was, like, ‘Oh, it would be cool if we did a global survey, and we understood what people’s supplementation, self-enhancement, and wellness protocols are.’ ” He went on, “What if we made a version of feng you jing”—a traditional Chinese medicinal oil— “and we just called it a ‘productivity popper’? Because it’s basically a popper.” They would market it to office workers.

“Oh, ‘popper’ is smart,” Gayomali, who had on a chain necklace and baggy clothes, and now works for the fashion Web site Ssense, said.

Chen, who wore a chunky sweater, mused on an effect of the Ozempic craze. “A lot of people are looking toward very toned bodies,” she said. “Because it’s a sign that you actually have the time to work out.”

The conversation veered to live-stream sellers hawking products online. Gayomali said, “There’s going to be so much shit that’s, like, red-light-slash-sauna-blanket-slash-moving-it-like-a-treadmill-thing at the same time. Even the drinks. The new stuff is like Celsius”—a popular energy drink.

“Multipurpose, multifunction,” Wang said, nodding.

“Plus protein,” Gayomali added. Last year, the firm advised a big-box retailer to make its own multipurpose drink. It is currently in development.

Another prediction: luxury wellness treatments combined with travel.“It’s going to be all about treatments now,” Gayomali said. “Like, going to Turkey for the—” he gestured at his hairline, which was hidden under a bandanna.

“When I go to Peru, I get, like, everything done,” Matos, in a fuzzy pink turtleneck, said. She pointed at her mouth. “I had my wisdom teeth taken out. It was ‘Buy one, get one free.’ ” Matos expressed interest in writing about men who venture to Peru to try kambo, a poisonous substance derived from frogs. “It heightens your senses,” she said. “But all these tech bros try it because they think it makes them more productive.”

Other trends under discussion: Gene editing. Protein sodas. N.F.T.s. Ozempic. Live-streamers. Fight clubs. “Girl math.” Ozempic, again. Luigi Mangione. Elon Musk. Creepypasta. Blind Box toys. Alternative investments. The Chinese app RedNote (a TikTok alternative). R.F.K., Jr. Corporate dress codes. Fan fiction.

Desaulles, who wore a denim top, spilled some water on her computer. She tilted it and dabbed at the keyboard with a napkin. Verdict: all good. Trend talk segued into action plans. “I think we all need to try raw milk at some point,” Wang said. “We need to go to a farm to drink it.”

“It’s worth trying,” Desaulles said.

“It’s good,” Gayomali agreed.

The group moved on to deciding what the chapters in the second Dossier should be. Clients such as Cash App and Mercedes-Benz pay the company for strategy consulting, but hard copies of the Dossiers are free for friends of the firm. The working title, they decided, would be “The New Pantheon.” Wang explained, “In an age where unlocking artificial general intelligence and human-lifespan extension seems entirely plausible within the next several decades, we feel it’s highly timely to reëxamine our relationship to timeless concepts underpinning the human condition.”

For now, most readers of the firm’s Dossiers are creative types. But Wang has set his sights higher. “I would love if Fortune 100 C-suite people actually read it and thought about it seriously,” he said.

Wrapping up the session, Wang addressed the issue of whether he’d be able to pay his researchers, who, so far, had been volunteering their time. He said that he still wasn’t sure the company had the cash flow.

Gayomali had a suggestion: “A trip to Peru.”

Wang cocked his head. “I would say totally,” he said. “Because it’s tax deductible.” ♦