NRF 2026: Five tech start-ups reshaping retail landscape

As the global fashion industry navigates a transformative period defined by technological integration and sustainability mandates, the NRF 2026 Innovators Showcase has emerged as a critical hub for next-generation solutions. Taking place at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York from 11 to 13 January, the event highlights companies bridging the gap between creative vision and operational efficiency.

Below, five innovators from the showcase discuss their roles in evolving the fashion product lifecycle, from AI-native design operations to circular infrastructure.

Heidi Van Dyck, founder & CEO of Athena

Who are you?

Athena studio is the first AI-native operating system for fashion product-to-market teams, with the ambition to bring the “Figma moment” to how physical products are developed.

What do you do?

While AI in fashion design so far has focused on creative tasks, athena studio addresses the other half of the work: manual process work. We built Athena, fashion’s first AI product-to-market assistant, helping creative teams refocus on developing products instead of managing processes.

Athena connects directly to the tools teams already use - PLMs, spreadsheets, Miro boards, emails and chat - and transforms all of that fragmented activity into a single, live, structured view of the collection. She works behind the scenes to keep the data up-to-date and interacts as a virtual assistant through chat platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack to keep product teams on track, flag errors and provide early, full collection visibility. No new platform. No process change.

What problem do you solve?

Bringing a new collection to market always feels a bit like playing roulette.

Even multibillion-dollar fashion brands make critical product decisions based on fragmented information spread across spreadsheets, chats, emails, design boards and outdated PLM systems. The result is structural inefficiency. Just look at the facts: over 50 percent of creative teams’ time is spent on managing processes instead of creating products. Roughly 70 percent of samples developed after months of work never reach the market. And with product timelines stretching beyond 12 months, late decisions and data errors routinely lead to missed drops, markdowns, air freight and lost revenue. This costs brands millions in avoidable costs and missed revenue every season.

Athena addresses the root cause: the lack of a live, reliable data layer during product development and tackles this hidden tax on creativity by giving teams early visibility, so mistakes are caught when they’re still cheap… before they’re on the factory floor.

What does it cost?

Athena is currently available for enterprise customers, with a pricing model tailored to team size, scope and integrations.

What sets you apart from other innovators?

Traditional enterprise software was built to store data. Athena is built to understand processes and decision-making.

The most valuable data in fashion isn’t the final product record, it’s the process and decision-making: who decided what, when, why, and what changed afterward. That context layer has never been captured, because it lives across conversations, files and tools that are not designed to talk to each other.

Athena continuously reconstructs that living context using AI, without forcing teams into new systems or rigid workflows. That’s why we often describe it as bringing a “Figma moment” to physical product development. It’s a fundamentally new way of working.

Can you name one (other) company at the showcase whose innovation you admire?

Vody AI. Just as Athena rethinks enterprise software - shifting from simply storing data to deeply understanding how and when product decisions are actually made - Vody rethinks product discovery. They move e-commerce search beyond rigid filters to contextual intent, helping customers find what they’re really looking for, whether that’s a “Coachella outfit” or a “Taylor Swift top.” That kind of context-driven thinking is what sets the next generation of e-commerce apart.

Tash Grossman, founder and CEO of Slip

Who are you?

We’re Slip, a retail technology innovator rethinking what happens after the transaction. Headquartered in London and working globally, we help fashion and lifestyle retailers turn the receipt into a digital, data-driven experience that connects physical retail with the digital ecosystem.

What do you do?

Slip provides fully branded, interactive and measurable digital receipts, delivered by SMS, email, WhatsApp or mobile apps. We sit at the intersection between the POS and CRM, hyper-personalising every receipt and optimising it for the customers’ next-best-action.

Working seamlessly across stores, without disrupting the checkout process, Slip supports retailers in extending the customer experience post-purchase with product details, care instructions, returns information, loyalty enrolment, and personalized recommendations directly into the receipt experience.

What problem do you solve?

Post-purchase communications consistently deliver some of the highest open, click-through, and conversion rates of any message a retailer sends. Yet receipts, one of the most opened post-purchase touchpoints, have remained largely untouched.

Slip unlocks this missed opportunity by transforming receipts into engaging, measurable post-purchase communications. For retailers, that means using a moment customers already care about to deliver service, brand value, and re-engagement, rather than letting it end as a static proof of purchase.

What does it cost?

Slip operates on a SaaS model, with pricing that scales based on transaction volume, markets, and feature set. ROI is driven by incremental revenue, CRM growth, and reduced paper and operational costs.

What sets you apart from other innovators?

Receipts may not look like an obvious place for innovation, but that’s exactly the point. They’re one of the few touchpoints every customer receives, yet they’ve barely changed in decades.

Slip is disrupting a universal, mandatory part of retail by turning it into a modern, digital channel that creates value for both retailers and customers. Instead of adding new tech layers or friction, we reimagine something that already exists, quietly upgrading it for a world where data, experience, and omnichannel connection matter.

Can you name one (other) company at the showcase which innovation you admire?

Having completed the New York Fashion Tech Lab with them earlier this year, we admire Vody for how they’re enabling smarter search, discovery and personalized shopping experiences. Their work highlights how foundational data enrichment is to next-generation retail tech and agent-driven commerce, it just makes so much sense!

Jen Rhi, founder and CEO of NXN Labs

Who are you?

Founded in 2024 by alumni from Stanford, Microsoft, and McKinsey, NXN Labs is an AI company building the Digital Production OS (Operating System) for modern commerce. With teams based in San Francisco and Seoul, we work at the intersection of world-class AI research and fashion-domain expertise.

What do you do?

NXN Labs is building the Digital Production OS for global brands and retailers. It’s an AI platform that generates on-model images, product videos, and automated production workflows, while also learning which visuals convert through continuous A/B testing.

What problem do you solve?

Retailers now operate in an environment where content demand has increased tremendously, due to the explosion of channels, formats, and shorter content lifecycles. PDP visuals must be refreshed continuously, localized across global markets, and optimized for conversion. But most teams still rely on slow, manual, and fragmented production workflows that cannot keep pace with merchandising and marketing.

NXN Labs addresses this with proprietary multimodal diffusion models that generate photorealistic visuals from a single product image and automate the entire downstream pipeline, including on-brand styling consistency, lighting and pose controls, compliance, localization, and API-based replenishment.

What does it cost?

It depends on the volume: we offer an on-demand studio model where clients pay per photo or video. Or and API Integration where you pay per API call (enterprise plans available).

What sets you apart from other innovators?

We were selected as an NVIDIA–Korean Government Startup Partner, which is a recognition of our technical leadership. And unlike pure AI tools, we pair proprietary GenAI with world-class human touch: in-house post-production and a high-fashion Creative Director, so everything ships production-ready.

Can you name one (other) company at the showcase which innovation you admire?

We admire DaVinci Commerce for taking AI beyond isolated tools and applying it across the full workflow of commercial media. Their focus on helping teams move faster without losing creative intent reflects how we believe AI should empower the commercial and creative process.

Chris Kilin, co-founder and CEO of Brandback

Who are you?

We are the intelligence layer for modern commerce, boosting product visibility across emerging AI channels with Glara.ai, while Brandback.ai embeds circular resale into your D2C store to unlock new revenue and retention. We’re headquartered in Berlin and support dozens of leading brands across the UK, Germany, and Nordics.

What do you do?

Glara is the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform tailored for ecommerce. We help brands boost product visibility on AI-driven search platforms like ChatGPT. Brandback enables retailers to embed peer-to-peer resale directly into their online stores, driving new sales and customer engagement without handling inventory or logistics.

What problem do you solve?

Fashion brands struggle to stand out on emerging AI search engines and to integrate resale without operational headaches. Glara delivers actionable product- and category-level insights for AI-driven discovery, while Brandback lets retailers launch resale with minimal effort, solving the disconnect between primary sales and resale, and unlocking new revenue streams.

What does it cost?

Glara offers transparent, tiered pricing: Starter plans begin at 99 euro per month (billed annually) for up to 20 products, Advanced at 299 euro per month (billed annually) for up to 50 products, and custom Enterprise plans for larger needs. Brandback pricing includes a SaaS fee based on customer size, plus a commission per item sold, shared with the retailer.

What sets you apart from other innovators?

Glara is purpose-built for ecommerce, delivering granular, vertical-specific optimization. Brandback stands out with its unique “toggle” feature, which lets shoppers see the resale value of an item during the initial purchase and save it for future resale. This not only increases conversion rates but also builds long-term loyalty by connecting the primary and resale journeys. Combined with our embedded, peer-to-peer model and rapid Shopify integration, this approach is unique in the market.

Can you name one (other) company at the showcase whose innovation you admire?

Envive stands out to us. Their approach to next-gen commerce aligns closely with our belief in the future of commerce: seamless, AI-driven, and customer-centric.

Katherine Volker, senior director of marketing of SuperCircle

Who are you?

SuperCircle is the full-stack, AI-powered operating system that manages textile end-of-life at scale, helping retailers turn waste from a cost center into a cash generator.

What do you do?

We provide the infrastructure needed to capture, sort, and route post-consumer and post-industrial textiles to their most profitable and responsible next-life outcome, supporting operational, financial, and regulatory goals across retail supply chains.

What problem do you solve?

Nearly 163 billion dollars of unsold inventory is discarded globally each year, with U.S. retailers absorbing significant losses across returns, processing costs, damaged goods, and unsellable stock, while more than 85 percent of textiles end up in landfills or incinerators. SuperCircle provides the operating system retailers need to capture value from this would-be waste while complying with new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations holding brands accountable for end-of-life processing.

What does it cost?

SuperCircle operates on a platform-based model, with pricing structured around volume, deployment scope, and services used. For retail brands, this means a flexible model designed to unlock recovery value, reduce write-downs, and deliver net-positive profit and loss impact rather than incremental cost.

What sets you apart from other innovators?

As retailers face tightening margins and rising operational costs, SuperCircle delivers the critical digital and physical infrastructure needed to reduce waste-related losses, ensuring every textile produced delivers maximum value.

Our AI-powered sortation engine ingests more than fifty garment-level data points to create a digital twin for every item. This allows us to evaluate the condition, material composition, value recovery, and other information to dynamically allocate each item to the most profitable next-life pathway like fiber-to-fiber recycling, open-loop recycling, verified donation or resale. We are already deployed across stores, distribution centers, and nationwide customer trade-in programs, powering circularity for more than 75 retailers including J.Crew, GUESS, Reformation, FIGS, and Parachute.

Can you name one (other) company at the showcase whose innovation you admire?

What’s most exciting about the Innovators Showcase is the collective momentum. There are companies here tackling everything from demand planning and supply-chain optimization to AI-driven insights and operational efficiency. We admire the broader group for pushing retail toward systems that are smarter, more connected, and more sustainable. It reinforces that meaningful change happens when innovation shows up across the entire lifecycle.

The Q&A's for this article were conducted in writing.