Cultivating Connection by Watering Our Weirdness
Discovering What Truly Connects People & Products
Session Overview:
TPIE’s 2026 Opening Session will help you build real connection with consumers by understanding their emotional quirks and creative potential.
About the speaker:
Jill Hawkins is a fashion psychologist and lifestyle futurist. She’s driven to help businesses and individuals design and live healthier, more creative and human-kind futures.
Jill has 20 years experience working with businesses like L’Oréal and LEGO to design futures that put people and creativity at the forefront of change. Through her consultancy, The Future Thief, she researches trends and human behaviour to design concepts that encourage healthy and sustainable choices. Blending design thinking, foresight skills and psychological science, Jill helps challenge established mindsets and lifestyle narratives that keep us stuck in unhealthy loops. She sees trends as cultural shifts to be understood, sometimes ignored, and applied only positively and with conscience.
As well as bespoke research projects, public speaking and writing, she teaches fashion culture at universities in the UK and Denmark; co-drives "Muceum", a new magazine about style and materials; and hosts 'Second Skin', a podcast about our relationships with clothing and our bodies. Jill is British, lives in Copenhagen, and she’s fun, friendly, colourful and loves dancing, drawing, hiking and exploring new places.
TPIE’s Opening Session is FREE to attend with your trade show badge, thanks to LiveTrends and its generous sponsorship.
