While 2025 was a turbulent year—one marked by economic factors and market conditions that heightened the need for information and adaptability—the overarching theme for brands and retailers in 2026 will be focusing on agility and informed decision-making, according to Joor’s recent white paper.
The fashion management platform’s latest market survey found that 52 percent of brand respondents reported wholesale as the most profitable distribution channel.
“The trends we’re seeing—from the resurgence of wholesale as a key driver of profitable growth to the dramatic shift toward in-season buying—demand that brands and retailers have a strategy built on real-time insights,” said Amanda McCormick Bacal, Joor’s senior vice president of marketing.
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On the artificial intelligence front, Joor reported that the conversation around AI is making a pivotal shift from being faster to “moving smarter.” AI is evolving from a design-centric novelty into the ultimate engine for achieving both the agility and informed decision-making required in modern wholesale.
To that end, Joor has incorporated AI into multiple processes on its platform. Joor Studio Services uses the technology to create custom virtual models across various body types, ages and styles—allowing buyers to visualize fit without the cost and time of physical samples. Joor’s Outreach feature, meanwhile, automatically generates personalized introductory messages for prospective retail partners, leveraging data to craft engagement-boosting messages.
As AI shifts from being a tool for driving operational efficiency to a powerful strategy for unlocking growth, Joor reported that the momentum will continue in 2026; Future Snoops all but confirmed it. AI is projected to add between $150 and $275 billion to the apparel, fashion and luxury sectors by 2028, the futures forecasting firm said.
Muse is Future Snoops’ new AI agent, “built into its platform to empower creators from research to activation,” per the trends predictor, “acting as an always-on partner” using proprietary intelligence to “bridge human intuition with machine precision.”
“What if AI exists specifically to unleash the full spectrum of our imagination—not to replace us, but to remind us how infinite we really are? What if this technology is here to return us to our creative essence, to make space for curiosity, emotion and the magic that only humans can feel?” asked Lilly Berelovich, co-founder and chief future vision officer of Future Snoops, during a webinar on Muse. “That’s the mission that we’re standing behind.”
Alongside dropping its creative intelligence engine, Future Snoops shared its “The Creatorship Era: Human Inspiration meets AI Precision” white paper—what the company is billing as a “manifesto for creators to reclaim their vision in the AI age.”
“The creatorship era is really looking at what will it take for us to claim us as the ones who get to carve the future that we want to be part of,” Berelovich said. “The white paper was our declaration—our mission statement, our blueprint—to say it’s possible.”
Positioned as the essential framework for how the fashion industry should approach Joor’s predicted trend of AI-driven acceleration, Future Snoops argued that the choice to embrace “active creatorship” is critical to securing human relevance and unlocking growth in an AI-dominated landscape. The framework is three-fold: ideate, validate, activate.
The white paper and its webinar were designed to serve as a reframing—a moment to “stop and reflect on how we actually want this technology to disrupt our lives, rather than letting it snowball in and slowly take over,” according to Emma Grace Bailey, Future Snoops’ director of sustainability.
“I want to start with the elephant in the room, and that is this slow creeping fear that AI is coming for our jobs; the fear that AI isn’t just changing creativity, but it’s actually starting to replace it—and ultimately, we as humans have taught it how to do that,” said Bailey. “We all know that AI is going absolutely nowhere and, as a company full of creatives, we know really firsthand the impact that this technology is already having.”
The white paper’s first phase considers ideation, moving from “prompt to possibility,” Bailey continued. The second stage—validation, moving from data to distinction—is where “we want to start asking ourselves how to move from relying on historical data to using cultural insight to confirm our own intuition.”
“Now, this is not a fear mongering exercise by any means. It’s a call to action, because if creativity is to thrive in the AI era, we have to step into creatorship,” Bailey said. “AI is a tool—like all the other tools that we use—and it will mirror the clarity of your own perspective. It’s all about enhancement, not replacement. Active engagement will secure and strengthen your role in the future.”
The third phase, activation, covers moving from “silos to success.” The shift works to move from a fragmented process “where creative intent is lost between siloed departments” to a connected one, where AI ensures alignment. The goal is to keep the original creative vision intact from concept to shelf. AI acts as a “living archive,” per the white paper—summarizing inputs, visualizing concepts for different departments to ensure that each team draws from the same core idea.
“Don’t let the path be all automated—we’ve been automated for too long,” Berelovich said. “Let’s unleash ourselves and really dive into the humanity and the creative force that we’re meant to be.”
Brands have already started to take advantage of the opportunity, Bailey said. Adidas, for instance, uses an in-house GenAI tool (dubbed Databricks) trained on customer reviews to extract sentiments and improve efficiency by up to 40 percent. A new sneaker from fellow sportswear brand, Puma, was conceived with its Inverse sneaker with AI as a co-pilot, according to Future Snoops.
Used its Inhale sneaker as archival inspiration, the German firm’s Inverse is “rooted in the brand’s heritage,” the white paper reads, while “breaking ground with new features” such as a midsole cage.
“Inverse is a deep dive into a new design mindset; our goal was to bridge the human experience with experimental technology,” said Scottie Gurwitz, lead product line manager at Puma. “AI doesn’t abide by the same rules as human designers—that can help us see things in new ways.”
