Sr. Trend Designer- Essential and Beauty

About us: 

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision to life through our values and culture. Learn more about Target here. 

Team Overview: 

A team within our Essentials & Beauty business leading trend forecasting and driving bold strategies across categories and the enterprise. We seek diverse skill sets and experiences to create compelling and differentiated strategies that shape future business, brand, and product vision, connect to enterprise strategic initiatives, and uncover new opportunities for long-term growth. 
 

Position Overview: 

As a Sr. Trend Designer in Essentials & Beauty, you will lead the identification, synthesis, and activation of emerging cultural, consumer, and category trends to inform product development, merchandising strategy, and enterprise decision-making. You will translate trend intelligence into actionable insights and strategic opportunities that drive growth, differentiation, and innovation across a broad portfolio of brands and categories. 

By connecting cultural shifts, consumer behaviors, and emerging market dynamics, you will uncover future opportunities and inspire new ways of meeting consumer needs—helping the business anticipate what comes next, not just respond to what exists today. This will be accomplished through: 

INTELLIGENCE AND INSIGHTS GATHERING 

• Leverage multiple sources of intelligence to identify and track emerging trends, cultural shifts, and evolving consumer behaviors across categories and competitive landscapes.  

• Lead deep-dive category analyses and deliver actionable insights and trend implications for merchants, product development, brand, and enterprise partners. 

• Monitor innovation, emerging markets, consumer behaviors, and macro cultural shifts to identify future opportunities, inform strategic priorities, and drive business growth. 
   

TREND AND CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT 

• Synthesize diverse inputs to identify macro trend landscape and emerging opportunity spaces, and future areas of consumer relevance in close partnership with cross-category trend teams. 

• Translate macro aesthetics and trends into pyramid-specific guidance across aesthetics, color and sensorial (fragrance, flavors, textures, and other sensorial expressions) to influence a broad portfolio of brands and categories. 

• Develop brand and category-specific seasonal and evergreen trend concepts that inform owned brands, product development, assortment activation and cross-category and future innovation opportunities.  

• Elevate trend concepts through exceptional visual design and refined aesthetic sensibility, crafting cohesive, inspiring narratives and expressions across color, form, imagery, materials, and storytelling that guide execution across brands and categories. 

• Create visually compelling trend reports, mood boards, presentations, and strategic narratives that simplify complex insights and inspire action across all levels of the organization. 

PARTNERSHIP AND INFLUENCE 

• Build trusted relationships and collaborate with partners across the enterprise while influencing through your expertise in trend forecasting, consumer insights, and cultural intelligence.  

• Coordinate effectively with partners across trend teams, product categories, brands, and merchandising to maximize impact of work 

• Influence leadership discussions by translating emerging trends, consumer shifts, and future opportunities into compelling stories, strategic recommendations, and actionable business opportunities 

• Champion new ways of working by leveraging your expertise and unique perspective to inspire teams, strengthen partnerships, and continuously evolve how trend intelligence is developed and activated. 

TEAM AND VALUES 

• A mentor to team members fostering inclusion, engaging in positive team culture and modeling collaboration 

• Lead with curiosity—continuously exploring trends, culture, design, emerging technologies, and new ways of thinking to inspire fresh ideas, challenge assumptions, and elevate creative outcomes. 

• Consistently engages, inspires and builds trust with team and partners 

• Consistent champion of Target values of inclusivity, connection and drive 

• Seek feedback, continually refine your craft, and contribute to raising the creative standard across the team. 

• This team works on-site 4 days/week from our Downtown MN campus
   

About you:  

• 6+ years experience in Design, Graphic Design, Concept and Trend Design, or similar area.  

• Exceptional elevated aesthetic voice and creative direction abilities through graphic layout, content organization, and clear visual concepting, with the ability to translate research, cultural insights, and emerging trends into visually compelling narratives, seasonal stories, and executive-ready presentations. 

• Passion for beauty, wellness, personal care, pets, and consumer lifestyle trends, with a natural curiosity for emerging cultural shifts, innovations, and evolving consumer needs 

• Strong brand-building acumen with the ability to connect trend insights to broader business strategy, product innovation, and owned brand growth. 

• Exceptional at developing partnerships and working in a team environment 

• Strong leadership skills with key strength in problem solving and innovation and comfortable with ambiguity and open-ended opportunities. 

• Exceptional storyteller and communicator with the ability to influence through visual, written, and verbal communication. 

• Advanced proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite, including Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, with strong working knowledge of Microsoft PowerPoint to create polished presentations, visual frameworks, strategic reports, and compelling communications 

• Experienced influencing at all levels to deliver clear trend vision 

• Business acumen and market knowledge, with the ability to synthesize cultural, consumer, trend, and data insights into compelling visions, strategic opportunities, future business, brand, and product vision, and future-focused recommendations 

• Demonstrated ability to work independently with minimal supervision 

• Ability to successfully work in a team environment 

• Ability to respond to business objectives with creative, innovative, and strategically grounded design solutions 

• Strong understanding of product development, trend forecasting methodologies, and concept development processes 

This position will operate as a Hybrid/in office work arrangement based on Target’s needs. A Hybrid/in office work arrangement means the team member’s core role will need to be performed both onsite at the Target HQ MN location the role is assigned to and virtually, depending upon what your role, team and tasks require for that day. Work duties cannot be performed outside of the country of the primary work location, unless otherwise prescribed by Target. Click here if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota https://corporate.target.com/about/purpose-history/communities/grants-corporate-giving/twin-cities-market