WEEKLY TRENDS REPORT
03 October 2025
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THIS WEEK’S FORECAST
FOR YOUR INFO
This week’s dates & microtrends
TikTok trends
Miss the smell of glue? Try the low-pressure scrap a day method
The ironic ‘The Lion’ trend makes a return. The Lion doesn’t concern themselves with their lack of sleep.
ICYMI
It was Fat Bear week in Alaska and the winner was 32 Chunk with 96,350 votes!
Demna’s Gucci star-studded short film: The Tiger. More Demi Moore please!
Digi updates
The new ick. Posing with a dog in a dating profile is seen as performative.
Don’t let your grandparents download the Vibes app, short form AI slop from Meta.
Phrase of the week
“Pudding mit gabel essen”. Germans are coming together to eat pudding with a fork. Lecker!!!
Tea of the week
How Gen Z are navigating divorce.
What we’re loving
We’ve got huge FOMO for the Pokémon Lucha Libre event.
The biggest question on everyone’s lips, who will be the new James Bond? Us, of course.
Established trends
The real meaning of Party 4 u. Throwing a party for paying off student loans
The classic proverb: teach a kid how to read a clock, they’ll wear a watch for life.
On our radar
Tron 3 – 10 October
The Celebrity Traitors – 08 October
TWICE: TEN The Story Goes On – 10 October
2XKO – 07 October
Battlefield 6 – 10 October
Insights of the week
The base system in dating is a relic of the past with Gen Z figuring out new ways to ‘score’. Productivity hack? AI generated work in the workplace is creating more work.
Weekly doses of cute
Grieving for the Octopus, hide and seek with a puppy, finding the perfect spot.
Rising trends
The sign of a good party? A magician pulling cards out of thin air.
The wild west of gambling. Betting on every facet of a sport with the ease of in-game betting
The future
The controversial first AI actress, Tilly Norwood
Stat of the week
Yearning for good butter. High-end butter had a 24% increase in sales compared to the 1% increase of mainstream butter.
One to watch
After 20 years, The Simpsons are making a return to the big screen. Will Spider-pig make a return?
Image: @unikatat
Image: Pokémon Latam
Image: @mcmonalds
TREND TRACKING
How some of the trends we’ve identified have evolved in recent months
Recovery shoes Quarter life reboots Climbing
cringe mountain
With recovery becoming a growing trend among health-conscious consumers, interest is growing in shoes that aid the recovery after the performance. Nike’s new shoe, the Mind 001, looks like a cloud with massage nodes. New Balance has its dreamy-looking recovery clogs. As one cultural foresight analyst said: “Athletic culture is embracing intentional rest as part of peak performance. The smartest sports brands understand something more complete: peak performance requires intentional recovery. Marathon training and meditation aren’t opposites; they’re partners.”
Gen Z is a little lost. According to Oxford’s careers service, they want meaning in their work but feel stuck in careers that feel “pointless and produce nothing,” with 35% of roles reportedly fitting that description. As a result, some universities are offering courses on quarter-life reboots. Oxford University’s five-day residential course is “designed for recent graduates and earlycareer professionals who feel stuck, uncertain, or ready for change”, recognising that young adults are spending much longer in the kidult stage and feel uncertain about their future paths.
2025 is the year of cringe, as younger generations lean into embarrassment. TikTok feeds are filled with the biggest fails and oops moments shared for online clout – from Jet2 holiday fails to Pepe the Prawn cringe dumping. Like all good internet trends, there’s even an endearing term for it: “climbing cringe mountain”. The creator who coined it decided that “being cringe was actually proof she was experimenting and taking risks. To her, “climbing cringe mountain” meant growth.” It’s striking a chord with a generation that grew up under digital scrutiny and where experimenting with different identities once felt impossible. Say it after me, you can’t get to the land of cool without climbing cringe mountain.
Trend: The soft life
Trend: Embracing cringe and chaos
Trend: Kidulthood
Image: Pexels
Image: @planet.daria
Image: @houseofheat
Weber Forecast Insight
The vibe for 2025? Chronically online brain rot. Fitting in online means understanding all the coded languages and meanings. It’s never been this easy to reach and understand younger generations so don’t mess up your terms, they’ll eat you alive.
This week’s long read
WE ALL SPEAK INTERNET
What the slang?
Internet speak was originally created to express entire emotions in fewer letters and the chronically online used to be a fringe community but now? Everyone is chronically online and everything’s an in-joke. Good luck if you want to keep up with new Gen Alpha slang terms coming out every week. The lexicon to fit in on the internet is growing bigger and bigger by the second.
Dan Brooks writes in the Atlantic about how online slang has evolved from having to use certain language to fit into different internet communities, to now it showing you’re just chronically online. It’s become too accessible for people to learn niche slang and with everyone using the same words, people on the internet are all beginning to sound the same. It’s been a problem with Reddit for years
Algospeak is a growing term referring to the use of coded language, euphuisms and emojis to bypass
social media moderation and censorship. E.g. pew pew or �� means gun. These terms are being rewarded by the algorithm and are becoming a part of the internet lexicon eventually bleeding into the real world. Imagery has always been a powerful way to react; we all love a good reaction image. This can be seen with TikTok recently introducing images in comments, it’s become a way to visualise what cannot be said. Our favourite
With us being 2 years into AI, people have started speaking and writing like AI. Certain words such as “meticulous,” “delve,” “realm,” and “adept” are being used 51% more frequently because of AI. Even Sam Altman has noticed the change.
Language is made to have its meanings constantly change, but is it changing a bit too fast for all of us to keep up? Are we heading towards an image-based language, hieroglyphics anyone?
Image: @etymologynerd
Image: @mrfalsefartydoodo
Image: @cali.alynn
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