If you want to know what your customers will want in six months, a year, or two decades, you need to understand the hidden trends that are already shaping their behaviour today. In this episode of Escape Your Limits, Matthew Januszek sits down with Prof. Dr. Carl Rohde — one of the world's leading trend forecasters — for a conversation about what the signals in the present tell us about the future of fitness, technology, and consumer culture.
Prof. Dr. Carl Rohde has spent his career helping major global brands see around corners. His research spans 47 universities and roughly 10,000 students through the Cool City Hunt project, producing validated trend intelligence for organisations like Adidas, BMW, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft. What he sees happening in society right now has direct implications for every fitness brand trying to understand where its members are headed.
About Prof. Dr. Carl Rohde
Prof. Dr. Carl Rohde is a cultural sociologist and professor of Future Forecasting, Trend Watching, and Innovation. He is the founder of Science of the Time, a research organisation dedicated to identifying and validating the emerging cultural trends that signal direction changes for brands, industries, and society at large. His work is grounded in the premise that the future is not random — it is legible, if you know what to look for.
His flagship research initiative, the Cool City Hunt project, operates across 47 universities with approximately 10,000 students worldwide, constructing local and global validated trends that inform the strategy of some of the world's most recognised brands — including Adidas, Bacardi, BMW, Canon, Coca-Cola, Footlocker, Heineken, Levi's, Microsoft, and Sony. The scale and methodology of this project give his forecasts a rigour that distinguishes them from typical trend commentary.
Prof. Dr. Carl Rohde describes his profession as predicting the future for a living, specifically as a forecaster concerned with future certainty. His approach focuses on how hidden trends in the present signal direction changes — not just for consumer preferences, but for the broader social, ecological, and technological forces that reshape entire industries.
What Prof. Dr. Carl Rohde and Matthew Januszek Talked About
- The future is not unknowable — it is embedded in present-day cultural signals that are already visible to anyone trained to look for them, which means that forecasting is a learnable discipline, not a guessing game.
- Eco trends will have a material influence on the fitness industry, reshaping how consumers think about the environmental footprint of their gym habits, the sourcing of equipment, and the energy use of facilities.
- Artificial intelligence will shift consumer expectations faster than most fitness operators are currently planning for — not by replacing human connection, but by raising the baseline standard for personalisation in every part of the experience.
- Understanding what will delight your customers in six months requires a different analytical frame than understanding what delights them today; the two are not the same question, and brands that conflate them tend to be permanently reactive.
- The Cool City Hunt methodology — drawing on thousands of researchers embedded in urban cultures around the world — reveals that consumer trends are not global monocultures; local variation matters enormously, and fitness brands expanding across markets ignore this at their peril.
- Cultural sociology provides a useful lens for fitness businesses because gym behaviour is not purely rational — it is shaped by identity, belonging, aspiration, and social signalling, all of which trend forecasting is designed to track.
- The brands that commission and act on validated trend research — rather than waiting for trends to become obvious — consistently gain a timing advantage that compounds over years into meaningful market position.
Why This Conversation Matters
Matthew Januszek has always brought an international and forward-looking perspective to the fitness industry, and Prof. Dr. Carl Rohde's conversation sits at the heart of why that perspective matters. Understanding where consumers are headed — before they articulate it themselves — is the difference between a fitness brand that leads its category and one that is perpetually catching up. That is a distinction Matthew thinks about constantly in his work with Escape Fitness USA.
The LIFTS Podcast with Mohammed Iqbal of SweatWorks is built around the same conviction: that the people who shape the future of fitness are the ones willing to engage seriously with the forces — social, technological, ecological — that are rewriting what consumers want. Prof. Dr. Carl Rohde's work gives every fitness entrepreneur a framework for doing exactly that, which is why this conversation belongs in the Escape Your Limits canon.
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube
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About Matthew Januszek
Matthew Januszek is the co-founder of Escape Fitness, the functional-training equipment brand he built from a UK startup into a global name supplying many of the world’s leading gyms, studios, and hotel fitness spaces. Following the separation of the UK and US businesses, Matthew’s focus today is Escape Fitness USA and the next chapter of the brand in North America. He hosted more than 300 episodes of the Escape Your Limits podcast and now co-hosts the LIFTS Podcast with SweatWorks founder Mohammed Iqbal, covering the business, science, and technology shaping the fitness industry. Explore more interviews and episodes on MatthewJanuszek.com.
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