Omnicom-owned insight and strategy agency Flamingo has hired Stine Hedegaard as a director in its specialist Style team, which boasts ongoing clients including adidas, Glossier and Chanel.
Educated to PhD level and with a background in psychology, Stine has more than 16 years’ experience in consumer insights and qualitative research, advising management on strategic issues, organisational change, innovation and product development based on future consumer demand.
Stine has worked with clients across architecture, energy, media, and the public sector, but has spent the last nine years working for organisations including the Danish Fashion Institute (as Development Director), H&M (as a Sustainability Researcher as part of an H&M-funded PhD programme) and COS (as a Sustainability Consultant) advising on organisational, managerial and strategic challenges in implementing sustainability. She also teaches a course on fashion consumer insight at the London College of Fashion, and previously lectured in marketing research at Copenhagen Business School.
Stine says: “Having been working at the intersection of consumer insight and sustainability in the fashion industry for the last nine years, I’ve noticed three barriers that are particularly challenging for companies with a sustainability commitment to resolve:
- Going beyond making incremental changes for more sustainable offerings to create genuinely disruptive innovations.
- Implementing sustainability across entire organisations to ensure that it is not just an add-on but part and parcel of the identity and culture of the brand.
- Getting consumers to ‘walk the talk’ and adopt sustainable consumer behaviour. I’ve seen time and time again that in exploring how to resolve sustainability challenges for a company, it’s vital to look not at what consumers say, but at what they do. Only from there can you understand which are the key levers to pull to drive more sustainable behaviour.
Flamingo is an agency that combines cultural and behavioural understanding — both of which are vital to driving sustainable consumption — with brand, communications and product strategy in the style sector, and has extensive expertise in addressing these challenges for clients.
I’m looking forward to building on the work I’ve been doing on sustainable consumption with an agency that has the cultural, behavioural and trends competencies — as well as the passion for consumer insight, sustainability and fashion — to truly drive change for current and future clients.”
With a PhD in organisation and management (CBS), MSc in Social Psychology (LSE) and an MSc in Psychology (University of Copenhagen), Stine is the author of several books, white papers and articles on consumer insights, strategic change and sustainability.
Launched in 1997, insight and strategy agency Flamingo’s clients include Diageo, Facebook, IKEA, Estee Lauder, GSK, Netflix and Google. Flamingo examines human behaviour with a peerless culture-led approach, assisting clients to understand and harness culture to drive change for their business.
Winner of 23 awards in the last 14 years, with several “Best Agency”, “Innovation” and “Best Agency to work in”, @flamingolondon garnered four awards in 2017 alone, including the Best Paper at Esomar for its work with Twitter.