The Onebeat team joined the industry at Retail’s Big Show in New York, where they kicked off 2025 by sharing the transformative power of in-season inventory optimization and execution alongside retail’s best and brightest. Convening more than 30,000 service, operations, and technology professionals from 6,200 brands across 100 countries, the annual NRF conference measures the pulse of the industry in a way that no other event can, providing invaluable insight on strategic “must haves” for retailers of every kind. Drawing on wisdom shared by thought leaders and innovators on the mainstage and the buzz in the exhibition halls, we’ve compiled our key NRF takeaways on what’s setting retailers up for success in 2025.
AI is everything, everywhere, all at once
AI is everything, everywhere, all at once: AI’s potency across a wide range of challenges was on full display, as was the industry’s enthusiasm for sharing insights and knowhow gleaned over the past decade of experimentation. NRF Chairman and Walmart CEO, John Furner, opened the event with reflections on the increasing importance of AI in today’s retail landscape. Stitch Fix CEO, Matt Baer, shared how AI helped them tweak new designs to reflect consumer preferences. Applications for real-time inventory management figured prominently in discussions around strategic advantage, with speakers repeatedly recommending the industry to upgrade to active, learning engine-backed platforms like Onebeat’s that enable quick response to real-time data.
Courting the next generation of consumers
With Gen Z firmly grounded in the workforce and Gen Alpha reaching the age of babysitting gigs and allowance, NRF helped retailers understand what these digital-native generations want from their retail experiences, and how to give it to them. H&M and trend expert, Casey Lewis, spoke to the importance of social engagement in Gen Z and Gen A-friendly spaces. Roblox’s Head of Retail and Fashion Partnerships spoke on the avatar economy, a vertical that’s essential for achieving relevance with the next wave of consumers. Each expert stressed the importance of youth-focused strategy initiatives in supporting brand relevance and longevity in 2025 and beyond.
Engaging and Empowering Employees
Retail is harnessing technology, creativity, and cultural capital to answer the ongoing labor shortage. While previous conferences devoted attention to the impact of manpower deficits in customer-facing positions, this year’s discussion on retail’s workforce stressed the importance of attracting IT and data professionals for longevity. E.l.f. Beauty’s Chief Digital Officer, Etka Chopra, spoke to the difficulty of building staff capable of navigating large-scale digital transformation. Leadership from Target and Great Place to Work emphasized leveraging technology to upscale employee confidence and competence while building the highly invested labor force retail needs to sustain its future.
Collaboration is King
The industry is doubling down on collaboration as the driving force for growth and resilience, evidenced by the prevalence of discussions surrounding strategic and technology partnerships featured on this year’s mainstage. The CEOs of Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Bluemercury spoke about their unified growth strategy, “A Bold New Chapter,” leveraging strategic synergy to unlock stronger operations, service, and branding. IT leaders from UNTUCKit, Veronica Beard, and Manolo Blahnik gathered to outline best practices for selecting technology partners that align with business goals—not just budgets. For technology providers, NRF offered insight into new ways to approach partnerships, shedding light on the particularly trouble-ridden aspects of supply chain, like inventory management, where retailers need the most support.
Upscaling Authenticity
Following the economic and supply upheavals that have characterized the 2020s thus far, retail is grounding itself in brand identity and value-structure to foster internal and external resilience. Best Buy CEO, Corrie Bailey, explained how functioning as a purpose-driven organization helps the company adhere to core values while providing the flexibility needed for innovation. Celebrity founder-CEO Tracee Ellis Ross spoke to brand authenticity’s oft-overlooked power to shape social and market trends. Whatever the strategic aim, NRF experts made clear that impactful change begins from the heart.
Conclusion
Counter to the diversity of topics on this year’s mainstage, all talks converged around synergy and connection as pillars for successful retail strategy in 2025. Interestingly, inventory operations figured prominently into such conversations, highlighting its importance in achieving strategic aims, be they service-related, operational, or cultural.
For a company like Onebeat that leverages AI to create inventory efficiency that supports brand relevance and resilience in the long-term, the ubiquity of inventory management in strategy conversations is easily understood. Beyond serving as the key vehicle for brand expression and customer engagement, inventory binds each stakeholder and component of the retail supply chain together. The extent to which a retail’s inventory is in flow or friction determines the success of engagement with customers, employees, and partners.
As the industry strives to build stronger connections and adapt to challenges, inventory management emerges as the natural starting point. At Onebeat, we’re doing our part to help the industry transform NRF insights into action, supplying retailers with dynamic inventory management solutions that align operations to strategic goals, drive employee and customer satisfaction, and provide the bandwidth every brand needs to evolve authentically in 2025 and beyond.
