Trends & Artefacts: viking wellness edition
In this week’s edition of Trends & Artefacts, we round up the snackable trends, stats and insights from around the world, including:
Qantas Deploys All-Female Crews at Scale
Victoria Legislates the Right to Work From Home
Spotify Lets Users Edit Their Algorithmic Taste Profile
Explainer: Viking Wellness
Beauty Commerce Shifts to Diagnose and Decide
Qantas Deploys All-Female Crews at Scale
In March 2025, Qantas Group operated more than 50 flights staffed entirely by women across pilots, engineers, ground crews and dispatchers, framing it as a diagnostic exercise, not just a gesture. Only around 10% of Australian pilots are female. The airline has set a target of 40% female cadet intake by 2028. When representation becomes a measurable business target, does the annual showcase still do the work it once did?
Victoria Legislates the Right to Work From Home
The Australian state of Victoria will from September 2026 legally protect employees' right to work remotely two days a week, writing the entitlement into its Equal Opportunity Act, one of the first jurisdictions globally to formalise hybrid work as a legal right rather than a company benefit. The government estimates the shift saves families around AU$5,300 a year in commuting costs. If flexibility moves from policy to law, how long before employees elsewhere start treating it as a baseline rather than a perk?
Spotify Lets Users Edit Their Algorithmic Taste Profile
Spotify is rolling out a feature allowing Premium listeners to view and edit the Taste Profile that drives its personalised recommendations, including Discover Weekly and Wrapped. Users can adjust future suggestions using natural language prompts, asking for more or less of a certain vibe, addressing years of complaints that shared accounts and ambient listening had distorted the algorithm. When platforms finally hand users the controls, is it an act of transparency or an admission that the algorithm was never as accurate as advertised?
Explainer: Viking Wellness
Contrast therapy, cycling between sauna heat and cold immersion, is expanding well beyond Scandinavia, with urban bathhouse concepts like Othership now operating across Toronto and New York, and Condé Nast Traveller naming Viking wellness one of its trends of 2026. Wellness experts point to a convergence of factors: rising interest in mental health, declining drinking culture, and a hunger for sober, communal rituals. If the sauna is becoming the new pub, what does that tell us about what we actually want from social spaces?
Beauty Commerce Shifts to Diagnose and Decide
Beauty shoppers are now arriving with questions. Revieve's 2025 index, drawn from millions of anonymised AI interactions across 100+ brands, finds guided diagnostic journeys converted at up to 1.9 times higher rates than standard funnels. Engagement depth now predicts purchase more reliably than speed to checkout. If confidence is the new conversion metric, how should brands rethink what a product page is actually for?
