Vicki Ostrom is a foresight strategist, product intelligence specialist and founder of Trendependent.

Her career began in theatre costume design before moving through apparel design and product development roles at JCPenney, Eddie Bauer and Tommy Bahama. She later spent more than a decade at SanMar, where she established and led the company’s trend function, translating cultural, consumer and design shifts into commercially useful direction for the branded-merchandise industry.

Now based in Wales, Vicki’s work brings together strategic foresight, cultural intelligence, design thinking and a lifelong sensitivity to colour, material, image and story. She is particularly interested in the space between observation and application: helping people understand not only what is changing, but why it matters and how they might use that understanding in their own work.

Through Trendependent, Vicki is developing a boutique intelligence service built around rich, modular materials that product professionals can discover, combine and apply across different clients and challenges. Rather than prescribing fixed answers, the system is intended to amplify users’ existing knowledge, judgement and creativity.

Her ambition is to make rigorous foresight feel more human, inspiring and usable—to replace overwhelm with clarity, generic trend information with depth, and passive consumption with active connection-making.