A Retail Geek's Take on NRF 2023

This marks my 30th NRF's Big Show; as usual, it didn't disappoint! This year the energy was palpable as throngs of attendees and vendors who avoided the pilgrimage to NYC for the last two years came out to see what the industry's brightest minds have in store for 2023 and beyond.?

As I've said in previous years, whether it's seeing the latest innovations in technology and business models or reconnecting with friends, clients, and colleagues, the Javits Center will always be "the room where it happens!"

I'm privileged to work with global retail brands, tech companies, and the finance community, creating value at the intersection of customer experience and digital enablement. At NRF, I get the opportunity to meet and hear from each of these constituents, exploring how they envision their customer-centric future and how they will create value with disruptive innovations. What follows are some of the highlights from those discussions.?

NRF 2023 seemed bigger, better, and busier than ever. The number of attendees was far more than any NRF in recent memory, with an estimated 35,000 attendees. The event started for me with the always spectacular VIP Awards. This retailer-vendor partnership event brings together those luminaries who are forging our industry's future and recognizes them for their innovation, empathy, and excellence. In just a few short years, Vicki Cantrell has created one of the top go-to events for our industry. Dave Finegan, the keynote speaker, shared his story of traveling the world for the last year and his unique insights into humanity, community, and collaboration.?

A crowd awaited the opening of the show floor and Conference Keynote Sessions on Sunday morning. As in years past, I scrambled to visit many vendors with solutions related to Clienteling, eCommerce Search & Personalization, Influencer Marketing, CRM, Loyalty, Video Chat/Livestreaming, Social Commerce, Size-fit, AI, Web 3, and other relevant retail engagement platforms.?

Unfortunately, I was too busy traversing two show floors and the Innovation Lab to attend most of the main sessions. However, the keynotes are always relevant and thought-provoking, and there's plenty of value in the Big Idea sessions. What follows are some observations on the vendors I found most compelling on the show floor. The opinions here are my own and are admittedly based on brief meetings and are far from a comprehensive review of the products mentioned or their relative competitive positioning. Apologies to those of you whom I met with and who aren't listed here.?

Noteworthy News. Some of the most newsworthy observations and announcements this year were almost unimaginable just a few years ago. The first was that Shopify is going after the large enterprise market and touted a component architecture that addresses this segment's unique needs. Second, Square, the darling of the small independent retailer segment, is also targeting larger enterprises. However, they seem to realize they will need to start with the smallest enterprises (<$50M) as they expand their capabilities to meet chain store requirements.?Watch these powerhouses to see how they impact the enterprise technology landscape.

Staffing and Store Operations. For enterprise retailers, tight labor markets make staffing, retention, and employee performance among their biggest challenges. In-store customer experience is tightly correlated with the quality of staff and service. So, getting this right has become a top priority. Vendors focused on store execution, tasks and communication, training and associate enablement tools had large crowds. Platforms like Yoobic, Zipline, Storeforce, and Cegid's recently acquired StoreIQ are changing the game for store operations executives and associates. Storeforce, with its WFM and individual performance metrics capabilities, adds other valuable dimensions to the category. We can expect these solutions to become table stakes in the year ahead.?

Clienteling. Anyone that knows me knows I've been passionate about Clienteling since the early 1990s. While it's taken decades to become a "must-have" technology, today, it's on every service-focused retailer's wishlist. This category continues to evolve as omnichannel commerce providers integrate Clienteling fundamentals with POS, OMS, and eCommerce platforms. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this category is the convergence of Livestreaming and 1:1 Video Chat with traditional Clienteling workflows. This humanizing of e-commerce brings together the best of in-store CX with an online channel. Tulip, a long-time leader in the space, added this capability during Covid and has continued to make transactional/POS enhancements to its product suite. Last year, it acquired a WFM product to gain greater insights into associate performance. Fast-growing Salesforce partner Proximity calls their converged solution the Retail Super App and continues to gain customer logos at a record pace. Salesfloor, another online to store to online engagement platform, began as an e-commerce chat/messaging and shopping platform but continues to grow its Clienteling and streaming capabilities. Mercaux, a French-based store platform, has also extended its offering. It appears to me that the roadmap for many of these more mature platforms is to provide a complete in-store omnichannel solution.?

A newcomer to the Clienteling space is the Italian startup, Alpha. This company was founded by former Gucci and Nike executives and landed for the first time on US shores this year at NRF. Their entry point of engagement is somewhat unique and philosophically different from other Clienteling platforms. An Alpha-equipped associate presents a QR code to the customer, generating a link that creates a profile and enables an ongoing interactive online or in-store associate-to-customer dialogue and a seamless in-app transaction. While not exhibiting, I did have a minute to meet with the CEO and CRO of Luxlock. I continue to be impressed with the elegance of their offering, particularly in the luxury segment. Not to be outdone, some of the more established commerce platforms are also adding Clienteling capabilities to their offering. OneView Commerce, a Boston-based "headless commerce" vendor, demonstrated their first wave of Clienteling capabilities, as did the Microsoft Dynamics for Retail offering. Both products are relatively nascent in feature and functionality but reside on a highly scalable and customizable platform capable of leveraging data and services wherever they live in the enterprise.?

Live Commerce. I personally believe that this virtual sales modality is here to stay and will continue to pick up momentum in 2023 and beyond. Coresight Research is an excellent source of industry research for those who want to see this emerging segment's growth and impact metrics. Retail's Covid shutdown spawned many new video streaming and chat platforms that, while impressive, don't (yet) have deep Clienteling capabilities. Lisa, a German Live Shopping and Social Commerce Adapter, Korea-based ShopLived US-based Firework, CommentSold, and eStreamly all had white-label Live Shopping products. Squadded, a France-based Social Shopping App, was showcased in the Innovation Lab and puts yet another spin on live shopping. Squadded brings together eCommerce and "shop-with-a-friend" capability and was recently awarded Delloite100 Fastest Growing Startups.?

Social Selling Platforms. This solution area continues to morph and evolve in various ways. A small startup, OneShop demonstrated a store-side social content creation tool that allows associates to post inventoried items and short-form videos directly from the store floor onto various social platforms. And when a customer is delighted with what they've purchased, solutions like Storytap close the loop, prompting the user to create an authentic video story about their experience instantly. These videos are automatically amplified with SEO and prioritized by search as video content, thereby directing potential customers to the eCommerce site. Given the importance of consumer reviews, I think we will see more of this in the future. Emplifi, recently acquired Pixlee, a sophisticated ratings and review content platform, and is embedding it into their Social Marketing Cloud and Social Commerce Cloud offerings. LTK, (formerly Like it to Know It) showed their latest Creator/Influencer and Shopper platforms that enable social influencers to monetize and for brands to engage their audiences through creator content.

Fit-tech. Size-Fit and Visualization technology continue to promise increased customer satisfaction and lower returns for eCommerce transactions. FitMatch.AI, MySizeID and SizeBay all showed different approaches to solving the online apparel fit problem. UK-based Zyler uses customer photos to create photorealistic renderings of consumers in garments, using a combination of measurements and an avatar body type. NY-based 3DLook, while in attendance, did not exhibit this year but has an offering that combines both of these capabilities. Since we are talking about fit, a new Italian startup, TAILOOR showed an online/offline made-to-measure clothing program with a 3D configurator. I started my retail tech career writing configuration software for my own menswear MTM business, so it was great to see this finally making the big stage.?

Metaverse. There was plenty of chatter regarding the Metaverse, though I didn't feel it was on anyone's 2023 shopping list. However, I did see loyalty and engagement platforms utilizing Web 3.0 from upstarts like BYONDXR and a virtual AR store platform from Obsess that continues to win new highly-creative projects.?

Retail Telecom.This year was the first time I saw a noticeable presence at NRF by the large Telcos. T-Mobile, a winner at the VIP Awards and sponsor of a Big Idea Session, talked about the enablement of the immersive retail store with 5G. Through their research lab, they are bringing forward new tools, a portfolio of innovation partners and delivering valuable insights for retailers while ensuring the connected future is in fact, connected. AT&T also took up some floor space and spoke of its intrinsic value propositions. More interestingly, AT&T demonstrated the FlorLink SmartHub IoT Platform downstairs in the Food and Hospitality Pavillion. This IoT appliance connects a host of smart devices to provide real-time, actionable alerts about customer activity and device health to multiple endpoints. IoT-enabled stores will be an essential innovation as retailers strive to improve customer satisfaction, sustainability, and operational efficiency in their businesses.

AI in Retail. No summary of NRF would be complete without mentioning the pervasiveness of AI in the emerging retail landscape. The Open.AI initiatives and ChatGPT seem to be on everyone's mind as proof that AI will disrupt life as we know it. AI is finding its way into virtually every solution, from autonomous store platforms to digital shopping advisors to call centers and analytic tools. I am particularly impressed with how AI enables hyper-personalized search and fashion recommendations with vendors like Lily.ai and Algolia. Lily told me the systems are getting better and better at assessing fashion style nuances, reducing the human training necessary to onboard a collection. I hope we will soon see these capabilities married to individual "explicit" customer/clienteled data, yielding a genuinely personal set of recommendations. With a nearly infinite amount of choice available to consumers, personalized curation will be an essential battleground for the future of online retailing.

It was wonderful to see the NRF Big Show back to its former glory. As expected, it was a great opportunity to see the next wave of retail innovation. I am sure that NRF 2023 will inspire countless global brands to continue creating new exciting shopping experiences and enable more competitive business practices. But, perhaps more importantly, it marks the beginning of a return to normalcy, a new set of possibilities for our industry, and an opportunity to commune with friends, clients, and colleagues. Wishing all of you success in the year ahead, and I look forward to seeing you again in NYC next year!

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