Retailers continue to be challenged in an environment of low consumer confidence, tariffs, and monetary policies. Fortunately, technology solutions that tackle retailers’ operational and strategic challenges can help reduce costs, drive efficiency, and create better customer experiences.
Forrester’s new report, 2025 NRF Europe Innovators: Retail-Focused Tech Companies To Watch, produced in partnership with the National Retail Federation (NRF) Innovation Advisory Committee, highlights 27 companies that are tackling problems and creating opportunities for retailers.
This research is the third in the 2025 series of reports about the NRF Innovators Showcase retail technology overviews that we published for the NRF Big Show in January and for NRF APAC in June.
What Is The NRF Europe Innovators Showcase?
The 2025 NRF Europe Innovators Showcase features over two dozen technology vendors from around the world, chosen by the NRF Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC). The NRF IAC is a group of over 20 industry leaders, venture capitalists, and technology accelerators (Forrester is a member). The IAC evaluates companies based on four key criteria:
Problem relevance. Does the technology solve a critical issue for retailers?
Significance. How widespread and impactful is the challenge that is being addressed?
Product-to-market fit. Has the solution proven its value through partnerships and pilots?
Scalability. Is the company ready to deliver at scale across the industry?
This report showcases two key areas of retail that the technologies address:
Supply Chain and Operations Revolution. Retailers now have the ability to use AI in many of their back-office and omnichannel operations. Among others, technology solutions featured include offerings that replace manual pricing strategies with machine learning, or that employ computer vision to capture more data on shopper behavior or to eliminate checkout scans.
Customer Experience Innovation. Personalization continues to be an area of retail investment. Some of the solutions featured include signals to capture insights on anonymous shoppers (who are usually difficult to personalize for), or solutions to improve sizing recommendations so fashion merchants can reduce returns.
Check out the report! NRF site visitors and Forrester clients can download the report from these respective websites to learn more about these companies.
