The NRF Experience

NRF is unlike any other retail conference. It’s part reunion, part crystal ball, part endurance sport. Fundamentally, it is THE place to feel the pulse of the industry. If you’ve been, you know. If you haven’t, you must go.

From the moment you step onto the Javits floor, you feel it: the scale, the ambition, the sheer momentum of an industry that refuses to stand still. Booths tower overhead. Screens pulse with dashboards and demos. Executives speed-walk between meetings. Companies huddle in corners fixing bugs in real time. The conference floor feels like its own city—entire ecosystems of retail technology built and dismantled in a matter of days. You can walk 20,000 steps without ever leaving the building.

This year, we heard a consistent refrain: Gen Z customers are returning to stores—“return to the mall!” But in-store teams aren’t prepared to meet the moment. Retailers were searching for leverage. How do we drive more conversion? Improve associate performance? Retain talent? Make the in-store experience meaningfully better?

It is clear that Ethosphere is meeting a moment of real pain—and opportunity—for retailers.

The Ethosphere Experience

For Ethosphere, this year’s NRF was something else entirely. We weren’t just attendees observing the future of retail—we were participants in shaping it. Ethosphere had the privilege of being featured in NRF’s Innovators Showcase, positioning us in one of the most heavily trafficked areas of the conference. From the moment the floor opened each morning, our booth was overflowing with retail leaders.

The Innovators Showcase isn’t just about visibility; it’s about context. Each year, it challenges senior leaders’ assumptions and helps them discover “what’s next.” The hundreds of visitors who streamed through the Ethosphere experience were curious, open, and genuinely searching for breakthrough ideas. That environment created high-quality conversations with true decision-makers—not just passersby collecting swag.

And then there was the leaderboard.

In addition to running live demos, we built a leaderboard into our booth to showcase how Ethosphere measures, coaches, and improves frontline performance. What we saw mirrored what happens when frontline teams first use our platform: people were hooked.

They wanted to try again and beat their first score. They brought colleagues over to compare results. They competed with themselves and with each other. Multiple brands even followed up afterward to ask where they ultimately ranked by the end of the conference.

It was a simple but striking reminder of the core humanity at the center of our product. Humans are wired for competition, growth, and recognition. Retail associates don’t just want to show up—they seek guidance, growth and fulfillment in their roles. The personalized feedback Ethosphere delivers isn’t punitive, it’s a gift. When performance becomes visible, specific, and actionable, engagement follows. Our gimmicky (we’ll admit it!) leaderboard didn’t just demonstrate our product. It demonstrated human nature.

A Sense of Urgency

Throughout the week, we heard the same reaction: “That is unbelievable. How do we pilot?” Not, “Send me something.” Not, “Circle back in Q3.” But, “How do we start?”

Retail executives immediately grasped the implications. For the first time, they could see a path to measuring and coaching real interactions on the sales floor—not through surveys or mystery shopping, but through real data that guides, develops and empowers their teams.

The pace of follow-up meetings exceeded our expectations. Many of the leaders we met moved quickly—looping in operations heads, innovation teams, and store leaders within days. For Ethosphere, NRF didn’t just generate interest. It generated action.

During the conference, a retail technology CEO shared something that surprised us: nearly half of their annual pipeline originates from NRF. Before exhibiting, we wouldn’t have guessed at such a high share. Now, we understand completely. When thousands of decision-makers gather with urgency and budget, momentum compounds quickly. We spoke directly with executives who could greenlight pilots, allocate resources, and move.

Ethosphere entered NRF with strong momentum. We had validation from partners and conviction that we are solving a meaningful problem. Now, we’re drinking from a firehose. NRF validated what we’ve believed from the start: frontline teams are retail’s most underleveraged growth driver. It also dramatically accelerated interest in our still young company.

There’s an old joke: What does the winner of the pie-eating contest get? More pie.

We showed up to demonstrate to the retail industry what’s possible. Retailers responded with enthusiasm and purpose. And now we have to take some antacids and continue to scale thoughtfully, deliver measurable impact, and ensure that every deployment delivers meaningful performance gains for frontline teams.

We couldn’t be more energized.