Honoring the late, great Frank Bober.

Frank Bober, founder and CEO of Stylesight, passed away in November 2025. Stylesight was an online design forecasting platform so foundational to the industry that when WGSN acquired it in 2013, they built their future on his architecture. The platform the world knows today as WGSN is, in its bones, what Frank built.

His path there was anything but linear. He began his career as Chief Designer for a men's apparel line, became President of Polo/Ralph Lauren at the age of 25, and then spent nearly thirty years building CMT Enterprises, a private label women's sportswear manufacturer, before selling it and pivoting entirely into technology and design forecasting. He was the kind of person who kept beginning things.

I spent three years at Stylesight as SVP of Global Trends, which is where I initially met Frank. He was my boss before he became my mentor, and my mentor before he became my friend. While that progression took years, I did not take any part of it for granted.

And he was not an easy person to work for. He had a booming voice, a sharp tongue, and a colorful vocabulary that left no room for ambiguity about where you stood. He had an intolerance for sloppy thinking and a standard that did not move for anyone. There were moments, honestly, when I could not tell if I was working for a genius or a lunatic. But of course, the older I get the more I know he was the former.

Frank was a rare human. He did not try to elevate the people around him but he certainly pushed them to elevate themselves. He saw what you were capable of before you did, and then he stayed in your face until you got there. If you were lucky enough to hear him offer one of his many Frankisms — catchy one-liners on life and work — you likely still remember it. He never stopped being genuinely excited about this industry, about ideas, about what was possible. That kind of energy is not common, and it is not replaceable.

In the years after I launched this company, Frank joined our advisory board and never stopped being exactly who he was: curious, direct, and relentlessly focused on what actually mattered. His fingerprints are on the way I think about foresight, about building with discipline and intention, and about what it means to have a standard worth holding.

I am endlessly grateful he was in my life and career. He is deeply missed.

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R.