Personally I believe that the "fads" are all dreamt up by the wholesalers and the production companies. What I mean is that a wholesaler gets a weird fish in, gives it a nifty name, and markets it as "rare", demand skyrockets and so does the price. Same with production companies, howerver the good news about them is that these fads drive the R&D and push them to want to make the sell and to market the next big thing. As far as the next big fad, I think someone will discover some type of coral with crazy colors, like the rainbow acans or something, and say its from the dead sea and the only living coral from there or something like that, LOL!
Actually it works in the reverse order. Wholesalers when it comes to fads are second only to the exporters/collectors in terms of being the slowest to jump on trends.
1) We the community, vendor plant, or vendor start the fads by generating interest either via threads or pictures. "Hey check out this amazing thing I just got".
2a) WE start getting flooded with request of dollar offers from our fellow collectors with a limited supply we cut up are pieces and sell them for what we can get for them. This price fluctuates depending on what each individual considers "fair"
2b) The Cherry pickers/(Sharks) aka savvy retailers exploit this by going to wholesalers/suppliers by cherry picking the pieces while trying not to let on that this may be an upcoming trend. (We try to get as much as we can as cheap as we can). If I go to the wholesalers and see 5 neon blue with orange poka dot frogspawns I buy them all. If I'm the guy with the best/most unique stuff I get the business. They also race to "name the piece" hoping to get a big piece of the market. Why is this you ask.
3) When the wholesalers finally take notice they increase in demand for specific corals. Increase the supply, and raise the price the price to try to capitalize on the vendors.
4) When the exporters catch on they meet the demand of the wholesalers, flood the market and the trend dies as prices plummet.
Every single piece I made BIG money off is because I had bought it before the wholesalers caught on to trends. Large Blue zoanthids rocks for 20-30$ sold on ebay 700-800$, acans, chalices, etc. It's a funny circle the ends up cutting off it's own head, and the smaller LFS are the ones that get burnt. Basically once the wholesalers find out what the items are retailing for they try to correct the margins and start charging a lot more. However by the time they usually end up finding out the trend is already in the decline so what happens is when your every day LFS (not high end store) gets enough requests for Blue Zoa and calls up the wholesalers reps and says hey can I get a couple of these they are now 400 a pop, there isn't enough meat on the bone so they don't buy them. The customer gets upset and say the store sucks and come back to us the cherry pickers for the best pieces. We can afford to pay higher price the wholesaler demands because we already capitalized on the trend early and eventually they become a loss leader for the next trending item we debut.
It basically follows the chain of demand, and not the other way around . If the wholesalers were to say HEY CHECK OUT This super awesome piece I have give me a grand for it. I respond with nobody is asking me for it, I'm not going to risk my money on it. Wholesalers are about moving volume. They aren't agile enough to adapt to trends fast enough to capitalize on them. If they could they would just run there own online stores and cherry pick the best stuff. Like Reefer Madness used to.
Fads aren't really a bad thing. It's only when scrupulous people (and/or vendors) get involved who misrepresent products either via lying about lineage, doctoring photos, lying about rarity, or selling wild fresh cut pieces under the assumption they are captive reared to extort the consumer. This is when things get out of hand and "fads/trends" get portrayed in a bad light. There is nothing wrong with everybody being into the same thing.
