Laid Off: Nordstrom's Head of Cultural Trends and Insights
"TikTok 'cores' are often just cute names for various aesthetic styles — they are not driven by cultural shifts, don’t influence changes in consumer behavior, and lack any significant market impact."
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In today’s issue, I talk to Anu Lingala, the former Head of Cultural Trends & Insights at Nordstrom, on her “messy” layoff, how she got into cultural insights work, and why she’s frustrated with trend forecasters on TikTok.
Anu Lingala led the cultural trend work for Nordstrom’s creative merchandising team. That means she looked at and analyzed patterns and shifts in culture — art, design, music, film — to forecast how people shop and dress.
In January of last year, Nordstrom interviewed Anu on her fashion projections for 2024, so she was surprised when her team was disbanded and laid off just two months later in March.
Anu thinks it may have had something to do with Nordstrom’s new Chief Merchandising Officer taking over at the start of the year. “He wasn’t very interested in innovation and wanted to refocus on the basics,” she said. She never got a straight answer.
“Your situation is resulting of the Culture and Trend team elimination and by consequence the job suppression,” was the direct quote from Anu’s manager. “This is not due to performance nor being a fit.”
This was a big blow to Anu — she had worked at Nordstrom for a total of four years and considers herself “a huge nerd who loves cultural theory and also fashion.” In short, this felt like a dream job.
“My layoff experience made me acutely aware that I was deriving far too much of my self-worth from my work,” she said. “I really defined myself by my career, which is so closely intertwined with my hobbies and interests. I think I’ve taken some good first steps to shift this mentality, but I still have a long way to go.”
How did they handle layoffs? You described the experience as messy.
I was on an international vacation, and it was a Wednesday. My manager texted me to say we needed to talk, and then delivered the news over the phone. A week later, I had still not received any written communication regarding the separation. I tried calling HR and they said an email would be sent by end of day, but it never came. I called again a couple days later, but they could only offer to "create a ticket." I texted my manager. She was able to find and send me the initial notification email and offboarding documents, but those just said I would receive a Docusign for the official separation agreement outlining my severance package, which had never come.
It felt messy because I had no idea where I stood without this information, and I didn’t know whether I should/could file for unemployment. In the end, the official Docusign eventually came weeks after I was laid off. The experience of having to chase up the severance agreement myself felt unnecessarily stressful. But I thankfully received a fair package.
Where were you when you found out?
Cartajena. Just landed from Medellin. After taking the call in the lobby, I returned to the hotel room that I was sharing with my friend and broke down crying while telling her the news. Luckily, I was traveling with a childhood friend who I’ve known since I was 13, so she was one of the best people for me to be with in that situation.
Did you see it coming?
Not really. The new Chief Merchandising Officer’s strategic approach certainly made it clear that we wouldn’t be able to put as much energy towards cultural trends. But our same team, including myself, had still been producing several longstanding fashion trend deliverables for the merchandising teams. So we basically thought we’d just need to reshuffle our focus again. It was quite clear that a reorg, and some layoffs, would happen during the week when I was on vacation, but my manager had suggested that our two-person team was safe.
At Nordstrom, you were a trend forecaster who led the cultural insights work for your creative merchandising team. How did you get into that work?
Since middle school, I was fascinated by fashion history — particularly how sociocultural shifts over time influenced how people dressed. I ended up studying fashion design at Cornell. A trend forecasting career sounded like a dream, but I had no idea how to pursue it. At the suggestion of my thesis advisor, I applied to some Master’s programs, and landed a full scholarship to study Design History at a joint program between the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum in London. While there, I was looking for a way to earn money part-time, and ended up doing some paid research internships for brand strategy agencies. That’s when I learned how people talk about trends beyond fashion — I realized that the same sort of cultural analysis can help uncover insights to inform business decisions on a much bigger scale.
After completing my masters, I worked as a fashion trend forecaster at Nordstrom in Seattle before moving back to New York. A job in Kantar Consulting’s Futures division helped me flex my trend skills across a much broader range of industries, from food to finance, and also sparked new ideas for how I could bring more rigor and structure to fashion trend work. I then had the chance to connect all the dots at Nordstrom in a sort of self-defined dream role. Until I was laid off.
You mentioned feeling frustrated with the current pop trend discourse and TikTok trend forecasters.
Over the past few years, it’s become obvious that trends are trending. At this point, I think we can all agree that the frenzy around “identifying” and “explaining” various TikTok “micro-trends” is exhausting and redundant. In reality, something “trending” on social media does not make it a culturally relevant trend. TikTok “cores” are often just cute names for various aesthetic styles — they are not driven by cultural shifts, don’t influence changes in consumer behavior, and lack any significant market impact. The rise of pop discourse over-hyping inconsequential fads has trivialized the entire concept of trends. And this can be quite frustrating for anyone who has dedicated years to studying or working to developing a skillset in cultural analysis and trend forecasting, because it devalues their work. A strategist I admire, Nikita Walia, recently wrote a great post on this topic.
You have been helping support your family through healthcare issues and struggles. Can you speak to how that's shaped your perspective on the state of healthcare in this country and how it's tied to our employment?
For several years now, I’ve been the highest income earner in my immediate family. Although I haven’t had to financially support them yet, I’ve deeply internalized the anxiety of that burden falling to me, which is part of why the layoff hit me pretty hard. I’m also the emergency contact person for all three family members, who have each been hospitalized multiple times over recent years.
Since being laid off last year, I’ve helped support my sister, a transgender woman, during her weeks-long recoveries from two gender-affirming surgeries. She’s in law school and purposefully wanted to do the surgeries ASAP because she was worried about how her options and insurance coverage might be affected by a potential Trump presidency, which turned out to be a smart move. I’ve also helped with caretaking for my father since he was diagnosed with stage four cancer. It was stressful to balance being with him in Houston, while also managing my hybrid office job in New York. But I’m really grateful that I was able to spend time with him before he passed away.
Like many people in America, I’ve always despised our healthcare system for being at best expensive and at worst exploitative. But helping my family through their health issues, while also coming to terms with the reality of how unreliable corporate employment is, has made me more aware of the manipulative aspects of tying our access to healthcare to our jobs.
It's been a year since you've been laid off. If you could go back and give yourself advice a year ago today, what would you tell yourself? How have you changed since then?
First, always backup any documents you’ll want, for your portfolio or future reference, onto a personal drive. This is obvious and simple, but I was lazy and didn’t do it. Since I was on vacation during the week of the layoff, with pitiful wifi access, I lost a lot of my work.
Second, emergency savings are critical. Prior to my layoff, I always had trouble letting such a large chunk of money just sit in a bank account. I’d save a bunch, and then end up pulling from it for an apartment move, or big vacation, under the guise that I’d just restock the pot afterwards. If I had my current six-month stock of emergency savings when I was laid off, I could’ve more easily hit pause to process and reset.
So third, take time to rest, reset and recover. Everyone said this after I was laid off. It was impossible for me, and yet I’d repeat it. My layoff experience confirmed that that I really don’t do well with uncertainty — I’m far too anxious, and my meager emergency fund didn’t help. I couldn’t relax. I wanted to start a trend-focused Substack, but I couldn’t concentrate or think straight. I couldn’t do much else besides endlessly doomscrolling LinkedIn. I wanted to explore freelance, but I wasn’t getting any promising responses from my outreach. After two months of stressing myself out, I landed a new full-time job, which I already knew I was distinctly unexcited about and would end up quitting after a short stint.
You're starting your own trend newsletter this year. First, can you tell us what we can expect from it? Who is it for?
I started my newsletter What’s Anu because of my frustrations with the superficial way I’ve seen trends discussed both on social media and in many mainstream publications. I wanted to share more about the actual process of cultural analysis that goes into trend forecasting, and how it can inform brand strategy. So far, I’ve written about some of the frameworks and methodologies that I’ve developed over the years, described the key macrotrends that I believe will impact culture for the latter half of this decade, and explained how I think about cultural shifts influencing aesthetic trends.
My current subscribers include a wide range of people from venture capital investors to brand strategists to students. Trend work is often done in silos, and I’m excited to see how taking a more open-source approach via Substack could unlock opportunities for constructive critique, collective reflection, insightful conversations and collaborations.
Secondly, you said that it's a way to develop a sustainable income outside of corporate dependency. Did experiencing a layoff factor into this?
Until I was laid off, I’d been pretty lucky throughout my career with relatively seamless job transitions. More than even the layoff itself, the difficulty of finding a new role afterwards was a wakeup call. It felt like there were barely any full-time opportunities to apply for, and I wasn’t getting any responses to my applications. I was also interested in using the layoff as a chance to explore freelance, but my inquiries were not getting enough traction.
The more time I spent in this process, and on LinkedIn, the more it seemed like building your own “personal brand” was increasingly a necessity to land the best gigs. The concept had always sounded a bit cringe-worthy to me. But my layoff experience made me realize that I’d spent ten years pouring all of my skills and ideas into corporate roles, without a lot to show for it beyond my resume — a lot of the work I’ve done can’t be shared publicly. I decided that publishing my thinking in an open forum like Substack could help me attract opportunities rather than constantly chasing them.
Excellent read!
Thank you to you! And Anu for sharing