Soon some of the senior sales guys noticed her sharp eye for cool, and they had Zandl do the rounds with them, helping them sell teen-oriented products to retail buyers. Then the buyers noticed, and they started calling Zandl with their questions about youth culture. "They just sort of saw me as a person who knew what was going on," she says. Finally Zandl noticed. She quit her job and set up her own business as a Person Who Knows What's Going On.

It wasn't an easy transition. When she made a good call at her old job, it was pure instinct. "We did no research," she says. "I just had a golden gut." That was fine when she was making bets with other people's money, but now that she had her own company, she needed more concrete information. Why did campaigns with long-haired models outperform those featuring short-haired models? Zandl knew they did, but she didn't know how she knew. To find out, she invented a new way to analyze trends and in the process created a whole new industry.

There's a certain myth floating around about trend watchers: the myth of the cool hunter. In 1997 a lengthy article appeared in the New Yorker magazine about trend researchers who could stroll through a hip neighborhood, watch the way the kids were dressing, listen to how they talked and, based on that, pick out the next season's hot products and hip trends. They were mystical dowsers of cool. Chief among them was a woman named DeeDee Gordon, whom we'll meet later on. Cool hunters didn't do much research, but their intuition was so good—their guts were so golden—that they didn't have to. They just knew. In the late 1990s sneaker companies and jeans companies paid cool hunters a lot of money to tell them what was coming next. Cool hunters themselves became, briefly, cool.

The trouble was, it turned out that cool hunting didn't work. "As hip as it was, as exciting as it was, very few people were able to monetize anything that came out of that," Zandl explains. "People were fed this line that if the cool hunter found it, then six months from now you would have a rip-roaring business. And I think a lot of people got burned by that." Either the cool hunters got it wrong—there were some infamous misses, like aprons for men—or they were right, but by the time the company rushed out a product to capitalize on the trend, it was already over. Predicting the future, it turns out, is hard work.

Zandl is an informational omnivore, taking in data wherever she goes, in whatever form it appears. But she can't be everywhere at once, so each year for the past 15 years, the Zandl Group has recruited 3,000 young people between the ages of 8 and 24 to find out what is and isn't cool. The group is ethnically and geographically diverse and gender-balanced. The kids are mostly found in malls, where they fill out lengthy questionnaires—favorite band, favorite activity, favorite brand—and have a Polaroid taken that goes in their file. Zandl reads every one.

They're oddly revealing. A survey with a snapshot of a skinny black teen clipped to it reveals his occupation as "security guard" and his ambition "to own my own reality." The last rebellious thing he did? Sex on top of a parked car. A pale, long-haired Costco clerk writes about his devotion to hair-metal band Pantera and his plans to market a music-production software package he's writing. Zandl maintains an ever expanding library of "crib chats"; she follows kids back to their houses and videotapes them talking about whatever they're interested in—usually sex, cars or electronics, sometimes all three. On a typical tape, three black teenagers squashed together on a beat-up living-room couch discuss the merits of in-car entertainment systems with the rigor and intensity of a Talmudic summit. "If you've got four TVs, a DVD player and a PlayStation 2 all in there," says one kid, summing up, "you're going to have girls who want to give you some. In your truck!" ("Aren't you glad you don't go to high school anymore?" Zandl asks me. Yes, I am.)

Zandl and her staff archive, collate and cross-reference all this information, then cross-breed it with data from other sources (she is an avid consumer of census data and opinion reports) and distill it into a bimonthly publication called the Hot Sheet. Subscribers include General Motors, Coca-Cola and Disney. A subscription costs $15,000 a year.

So what does Zandl see in the future? For starters, strippers. "They're really setting the trends right now," she says, fast-forwarding her way through a videotaped ad for a home-use stripper pole. "I think strippers have become hugely important. I think we'll see pole dancing on ESPN in five years." Zandl loves everything cholo, a Hispanic street subculture that's heavily into tattoos and low-riders. She has been watching the steady growth of the Hispanic population in the U.S. over the past two decades and thinks it's long overdue to make a significant impact on the mainstream scene. "I feel about this the way I felt about hip-hop," she says. She's high on anything mobile and portable, especially things that fit in your car—she loves audiobooks and those blue melt-in-your-mouth Listerine strips. She tells a story about a bank in Virginia that has been converted into a church, with a drive-through prayer center. "There are going to be a million things you can do in your caw," she says in her Austral-Germanic English.

The god of the trend spotter is the 14-year-old hipster, and it is a cruel and fickle god with many prophets. Claire Brooks is executive strategic-planning director of the Lambesis Agency, a firm in Carlsbad, Calif., that publishes a trend bible called the L Style Report. Like Zandl, Brooks depends on information from a network of youthful informants, but Brooks runs her data-gathering operation more like a domestic espionage ring. "We have this network of people around the country," she explains. "They are trendsetters—people establishing careers in fashion and music, in film, in marketing, in advertising." She calls them the Urban Pioneers. They're the Navy SEALs of cool, and Brooks is casually ruthless about who makes the cut. "After a while, you just get to know when you're talking to a trendsetter," she explains. "There are a lot of early-mainstream people who really think that they're trendsetters—the people who say, 'I really love Gap.' And you just think, Yeah, you really don't know about that, do you? Whereas the true trendsetter will be making her own clothing. Or her friend will just have started a boutique or a fashion line or whatever." If you find that this kind of talk brings back half-buried memories of being picked last at kickball, you're not alone. It's impossible to talk to Brooks without inwardly measuring yourself against the golden yardstick of cool and coming up short.

Once you look for them, you'll see that America is crawling with these sleeper agents of cool. Dozens of companies—Radar Communications, Teenage Research Unlimited, even Teen People magazine (which, like TIME, is published by Time Inc.)—keep stables of tens of thousands of teenage correspondents, paying them in either cash or product samples and other freebies. Interestingly, the people running these networks are almost exclusively women. The cool industry is a matriarchal one. "Women are the networkers, the chatterers," says Brooks. "I think that what you need in this industry is an ability to get beneath what people are saying and doing and look at what it really means, and I think that those are skills that we are good at."

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