Fun fact, I was on a beach in the south of Portugal when NRF rolled around in 2023.

It was nice. It was calm. It was WARM!

I attended in 2024 while living in NYC. But, the 2025 edition was a wild ride filled with keynotes, networking dinners, podcasts and so much more.

You don’t have to take a wild ride, instead you can read my highlights below.

Tech Use Cases:

Walmart’s President and CEO, John Furner and Nvidia’s Azita Martin discussed how the retailer assists employees with technology. For example, digital twins of products and 3D assets are used in faster ad creation. In this case, a digital twin is used in place of developing and fitting a physical garment, then finding the right accessories and model for a photoshoot. Once the ad is live, if there is feedback on the garment, marketing informs merchandising and adjustments are made in real time.

Nvidia coined the concept of Physics AI. The idea is to create of physically accurate digital twins of stores and distribution centers. This gives Walmart the ability to simulate different layouts before making capital investments in physical spaces and products. Sensor data and AI models can drive warehouse efficiencies like AI agents that use sensors to reroute forklifts if an accident has occurred of if obstacles/boxes have fallen in a route.

The Customer in Focus:

Pete Nordstrom and Burberry’s CEO, Joshua Schulman, spoke about the challenges that the brand is facing. Big surprise. It was about focusing on why customers shopped the brand. Both Pete and Josh focused on listening to the customer and understanding why they wanted to shop the brand. Burberry’s brand is embedded in heritage and this is what what the customer loves about it. However, they have strayed too far away from their identity and have to work hard to get back to it.

CEOs Tony Spring of Macy’s, Olivier Bron of Bloomingdale’s and Maly Bernstein of Bluemercury also focussed on the customer. Making the case for Macy’s relevance, Tony prioritized the customer’s desire for a better assortment, better service experiences and visual presentation. This great to hear but I wanted to check out the stores for myself. I visited Macy’s in Herald Square last week and I can see the improvements in the flagship store, but there is still work to be done in the smaller footprints. There will be clear winners and losers in retail 2025, and candidly, Macy’s could go either way.

Sheena Butler-Young of BoF sat down with Pattern Beauty’s CEO, Tracee Ellis Ross. Fun fact, 65% to 75% of the global market has textured hair. The total addressable market in the US is estimated to be over $31 billion. There was a gap in the market and so Pattern Beauty was born. Tracee started with an assortment of only seven SKUs. Once she refined her assortment and learned about what her customer wanted, Tracee launched wholesale with one retailer, ULTA Beauty. The retailer was willing to work with Pattern in scaling the brand by guaranteeing a large number of distribution doors. Innovation comes in all forms. For Pattern, this includes a hair dryer with a diffuser that locks in or a hair dryer brush that doesn’t overheat.

On the final day, I joined NRF’s Scot Case and the Deloitte team in co-hosting National Retail Federation sustainability council’s retail circularity workshop. With four-hours, 70 participants, and a few panel discussions, we compared and discussed sustainability efforts across the retail end to end. We covered topics from Goodwill’s circularity initiatives to product creation using circular materials. Coach partnered with Bank & Vogue to create the Soho bag using post-consumer denim and Crate & Barrel’s commitment to sustainable and responsible product creation practices were highlights.

Here are my three takeaways from the session:

1 – Align incentives with the organization’s sustainability and circularity strategy. This will increase the likelihood that approaches like innovative or circular materials are used in product creation. However, aligning incentives with outcomes is nothing new, Peter Drucker was writing about that 40 years ago.

2 – Be transparent with your customers. Educate the customer on what steps you are taking towards circularity and embed it in all parts of your organization, especially if it impacts the retail price.

3 – Standards and certifications are fragmented. A universal (or at least as close to universal as possible) set of standards are needed. This way, the entire industry, no matter the category, can measure and track success. Easier said than done, I get it.

On my final day in NYC, I took a quick trip down to SoHo for some store tours and documented the journey — which will be the topic for next week’s newsletter.

And that, my friends, is my NRF recap.