The Designer Who Doesn't Google
Clare Waight Keller, Creative Director, Uniqlo · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.
Ask the creative director of one of the world’s largest clothing retailers what tools she uses to read a technology-soaked market, and the answer stops you: “For me, I don’t use anything.” No Pinterest, no Instagram search, no algorithm. Two months of doing the research herself, by eye and by instinct.
Clare Waight Keller is Creative Director of Uniqlo, arriving there after a career at the top of luxury. She now designs clothes worn head to toe in the queue at the airport rather than admired from a distance.
Her case is that the thing that matters most in design is the thing a machine cannot yet do. Separating a five-minute trend from a lasting one, she says, comes down to one discipline: “You have to watch it.” It is gut, honed over decades, and so far at Uniqlo it has played out well. The rest is process. A design goes through six months of refinement, fabric, quality control, touch point after touch point, until it becomes, in her words, “the perfect Uniqlo product.” And the reach is deliberately broad: democratic sizing, tropical buys for Southeast Asia, specific product for Muslim countries, Canada bought differently from the Philippines. One brand, many climates.
What should a retailer take from this? That the most defensible thing you own may be the least automatable. Anyone can scrape a feed. Almost no one can stand in the culture for two months and know, by feel, what will last. The instinct is the moat.
The Roth Read. If your trend forecasting is now a dashboard anyone can buy, you have bought your competitors the same edge you have. Waight Keller’s advantage is that she does the looking herself, and looking is expensive, slow and hard to copy. Ask whether you have outsourced the one judgement you should have kept.
David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.