From rock and roll to punk, and from flares to ripped denims, the tastes and fashions of youth have typically been a dependable indicator of the place shopper traits are heading. As well as, youngsters exert appreciable shopper strain by way of their dad and mom’ wallets. Therefore, being on high of these traits makes enterprise sense, particularly as right now’s fringe concepts can grow to be tomorrow’s multi-billion-dollar trade.
Understanding the habits, needs and attitudes of right now’s youth is important. Technology Z is the group of individuals born between the mid-Nineteen Nineties and the 2010s. Members of Gen Z are the primary to develop up in a world the place the online and social media is ubiquitous. In consequence, they spend an awesome proportion of their time consuming and interacting with digital content material. For a lot of of right now’s younger folks, a lot of life’s experiences may be considered by means of the lens of a smartphone and that’s what they use to share and touch upon what they like.
Prequel is an more and more fashionable photograph and video-editing app for iOS and Android gadgets that gives a library of ‘aesthetic filters’ that can be utilized to regulate, alter and enhance digital imagery. By including particular results and stylistic tweaks, customers can personalize their content material and Gen Z customers appear to be coming to Prequel of their droves.
Since its launch in 2018, the Prequel app has been downloaded greater than 100 million instances. It has persistently been one of the crucial fashionable apps of its kind, particularly within the US, Europe, South America and Asia. The overwhelming core of its customers is the youthful era.
Prequel boasts greater than 5 million followers on TikTok and Instagram, with the majority of paying prospects underneath 25. As well as, the app has racked up a string of superstar endorsements from A-listers, with musicians, actors and fashions posting content material to their social media accounts utilizing Prequel to decorate their photographs.
Below the hood, Prequel makes use of some intelligent expertise. The filters are greater than the easy results constructed into Fb, TikTok and Instagram. As a substitute, they’re created and processed utilizing machine-learning algorithms, with outcomes starting from refined colour shifts to finish reimagining of a picture. In consequence, the app is gigantic enjoyable to make use of and the Cartoon filter is a agency favourite. Customers appear to have fallen in love with the best way it could flip a selfie into what appears to be like like a hand-drawn picture that presents somebody’s portrait as a ravishing and glamourized model of themselves.
Maybe the key to Prequel’s recognition can greatest be defined in how Gen Z’s angle to imagery is altering. Older generations obtained into images by means of the medium of movie. Nevertheless, you needed to pay for a restricted variety of photographs; creating every picture and bringing them again from the lab took time. Standalone digital cameras modified all this. Nevertheless, these first-generation digital cameras have now been totally changed by the smartphone. The picture high quality produced by smartphones is superb and has the benefit of all the time being with the consumer and able to seize any state of affairs or occasion.
Now that limitless digital representations have grow to be the norm, Gen Z customers naturally take them without any consideration. They’re so used to digital photographs; they now crave one thing new. Many need a extra personalised, much less excellent window on the world that allows them to embed their emotions within the inventive content material they share.
Even a small change, corresponding to extra textual content in a specific font, or a extra washed-out colour impact, could make an on-screen picture look extra private. One clarification may very well be {that a} filtered picture encourages the viewer to really feel a sure manner in regards to the content material. Prequel’s vary of filters provides this dreamy and dramatic impact on the contact of a button with out having to take a position a number of time enhancing an image utilizing conventional instruments like Adobe Photoshop or Last Reduce Professional.
The manipulation of photographs utilizing filters is an idea that extra purist photographers typically sneer at. After capturing excellent representations of the world with right now’s superior digital cameras, the thought goes towards all their film-based instincts to decorate a picture with extra digital results. Nevertheless, is including a filter so completely different from how knowledgeable photographer rigorously units up their lighting, enhances shadows or manipulates colour to create a sure temper? When that picture is finally revealed, it’s most positively been tweaked and adjusted utilizing software program like Photoshop.
For Gen Z, Prequel does one thing related utilizing intelligent expertise that may flip a picture snapped with an iPhone into one thing that appears prefer it may very well be on {a magazine} cowl. The result’s the creation of a dream the place the consumer imagines themself as a celeb or famous person media character, one thing many younger folks determine with. It’s an instance of how Prequel and its filters take image-making past the correct 1:1 photograph by extending the picture to incorporate private emotions.
The most recent addition to Prequel’s Cartoon+ filter is imposing. It brings the hand-drawn art work look that Prequel is understood for to video as a substitute of simply nonetheless photographs. As well as, Cartoon+ creates an impact that lets the consumer think about themselves as a Pixar character, inside A-Ha’s well-known Take On Me music video, or no matter anime they’ll think about. The outcomes are particular person and gorgeous when mixed with Prequel’s different stylistic results.
Prequel retains its customers engaged by repeatedly releasing a schedule of latest filters and methods to make a picture look cool. Each time new filters are added to the catalog, it causes a frenzy of downloading as customers compete to be the primary to create one thing utilizing no matter new results the Prequel workforce has provide you with.
Based mostly out of New York, Prequel’s CEO Timur Khabirov, has gone to appreciable lengths to embed creativity inside his workforce, which is made up of each Gen Z and millennials. Prequel claims it was impressed by town, notably Bryant Park, the place early meetups had been held and helped embed town’s inventive spirit inside the app.
Prequel says it’s now tapping into greater than mere visualizations after a interval of speedy international development. It sees the app as one thing nearer to a broader social development for Gen Z, who’ve by no means identified a life with out the Web, and the flexibility to govern photographs, in order that they extra successfully venture the creator’s character and values. A private picture, on this case, shouldn’t be a photograph picture however an id picture. It appears to be like like we’re transferring right into a extra visually literate age the place folks will categorical and venture themselves with style-based images that claims who they’re and what they worth.
Pricing & Availability: The Prequel app is offered for iOS and Android gadgets from the Apple App Retailer or Google Play. A 3-day free trial and a full subscription prices from $4.99 for one week to $34.99 for an entire yr.
Extra data: