New Black

Bonjour again, Paris! 🇫🇷 The #RetailRunsoniOS ecosystem is returning to #NRFParis. Find us at the Adyen Booth (Hall 6, G-022), where the ecosystem is helping retailers adapt to contextual commerce, from the associate on the floor to everything humming along behind the scenes. Whether you're exploring what's next in retail tech or looking to sharpen your in-store experience, we'd love to connect and show you how our partner ecosystem is helping retailers transform the way they work. 🗓️ Wed, September 16, 2026 🕛 12:00 – 14:00 CEST 📍 Adyen Booth · Hall 6, G-022 · Paris Expo Porte de Versailles Swing by, and stay for a good lunch on us 🍽️ RSVP via the link in comments Apple Adyen IPORT Jamf ienterprise Nedap Ingrid ⚫️ Zipline

July’s done. The theme was Loyalty, and three pieces landed in the same place: people don’t stay for the points. They stay for what a brand says about who they are. Sofia Bilbao Castillo mapped the mechanics in The Recognition Ladder: “Discounts keep customers on the bottom rung. Recognition and discovery move them up it.” Suzanne C. showed the plumbing underneath. Feeling seen isn’t magic, it’s a unified customer record first, everything else on top: “Every ‘personal’ touch, every AI recommendation, is really just a guess dressed up as intimacy.” Nathan Jefferson, building Dadversity by night, put it in four words: “Expect nothing. Give everything.” Loyalty is identity. You can’t buy it with a coupon. Read them via the link in comment. Then ask the only question that matters: do your best customers actually see themselves in you? #NERDCommunity #loyalty #CommunityBuilding #Retail

Meet the #NERDSpotlight for July, Nathan Jefferson. In the UK, 2.6 million children grow up with father absence. Nathan lived the gap himself: he struggled to bond with his first son for 12 months and heard the same from friends. So he built Dadversity, the community he wished he’d had, where modern dads can be the fathers their children deserve. Running that community taught him something retailers keep getting wrong about loyalty. Most still think it comes down to discounts and points. Nathan doesn’t buy it: “Transactions can be bought with smart marketing. Product and experience drive future revenue.” On community, he’s blunt. People can tell when a room is built for them, and when it’s built to pump up advertising dollars. His advice to brands: be braver. And on what to do before spending a single pound building loyalty with a community, four words: Expect nothing. Give everything. See the full interview in the comment. Thanks for spending time with us, Nathan. Now go back to the sun. #Dadversity #UnifiedCommerce #RetailCommunity #CustomerLoyalty #NERD

🙌 July’s Nerd Notes are live! We’ve spent this month on one question: why do people actually stay loyal to a brand? Think about the brands that you love, and most likely, they say a lot about who you are. Loyalty is identity. That’s the part the points model never accounts for. People don’t belong to a rewards scheme. They belong to things that reflect them back: their taste, their effort, the group they want to be counted among. A tier name can’t manufacture that. A discount definitely can’t. And customers know the difference. They can tell when they’re part of a community and when they’re just a row in a database being nudged toward another purchase. Belonging is something a customer can feel, extraction too. So the question we’re putting to the community this month isn’t “how do we reward spending.” It’s “do our best customers actually see themselves in us?” Read them and get to know your customer better. Link in comment. #NerdCommunity #Loyalty #Retail #CustomerExperience #Clienteling

Most loyalty programs are quietly teaching your customers to leave. Points, tiers, “spend £50 get £10 back”: all of it trains people to calculate. And a customer who calculates walks the second someone else runs the math better. July’s Nerd Notes is about the brands doing the opposite. Nike won’t tell you how to get picked for a #SNKRS drop. Strava buries challenges so the people who find them feel like they’re in on something. SEPHORA’s top tier spends £1,000 a year and gets no sitewide discount, just a room most people can’t get into. None of them compete on price. They compete on recognition. Out soon. Join the NERD Community to get the first notification when it is live. #NerdCommunity #Loyalty #Retail #CustomerExperience #Clienteling

We want to celebrate Jan-Willem van Setten, who has reached #Innovator in #NERDCommunity. Innovator is not a tier many people get to. It takes time, real contribution, and showing up when it matters. He's the Enterprise Architect at Hunkemöller, doing the actual work of making unified commerce happen inside the business. The kind of work that moves things forward without always being visible. Congrats, Jan-Willem. Well earned. 🏆 And if you're reading this: the path he took is open to you too. Show up, share what you're learning, contribute where it counts. Reach Innovator, and you'll be in good company. #UnifiedCommerce #Retail #RetailTech #NERD

This June, the #NerdCommunity took on digital transformation. Everyone says they're doing it. Most aren't. We looked at it from both perspectives: the strategy in the boardroom and the execution on the floor. A few things stood out: 1️⃣ Endless aisle sells itself as a customer experience win. Underneath, it's a financial architecture problem. Skip the accounting design upfront, and finance pays for it by hand for months. 2️⃣ New systems, new processes, new org charts. None of it matters if behaviour snaps back to the old way within six months. The transformation lives in the people, not the rollout plan. 3️⃣ The split is 10/90. Technology is the easy part. Most programmes still spend like it's the hard part. And of course, a small recap on the success of our internal product presentation, for which we had the pleasure of hosting a few of the Nerds who've been most active in contributing and building. Not a #NERD yet? The link to join is in the comments. #DigitalTransformation #ChangeManagement #RetailTech #UnifiedCommerce

Not many meetings end up with a selfie with Tim Cook. Yesterday, our CEO, Steven Bakker was among a select group of around 200 global CEOs and a very select number of technology partners invited to Apple Park in Cupertino for a private gathering hosted by Apple's leadership: - Tim Cook (CEO) - John Ternus (incoming CEO) - Craig Federighi (SVP Software Engineering) - Kevan Parekh (CFO) - Susan Prescott (VP Developer Relations & Enterprise Markets) We love how graciously the CEO transition is being organised at Apple, with John as "incoming CEO" running alongside Tim for several months. Some of the other technology partners in the room: - Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas - Anthropic co-founder Derk Kaplan The conversations covered a lot of ground, from Apple's unique unified memory architecture, its obsession for performance per Watt, the AI architecture explained on silicon level and Private Cloud Compute (enterprise-grade AI that is cryptographically verifiable to never leak into logs or training data), to how Apple in essence embeds enterprise requirements into every product team from the very start, to one of our favorits the honest economics of device TCO for CIOs. (https://lnkd.in/gu69TWkD) But what stayed with Steven most were Tim Cook's closing words: "the most important thing is the people and culture around you. Build a team where one plus one equals three. And find joy in the journey, not just the milestones ahead." For New Black, the choice we made 8 years ago to build natively on iOS for all store associate-facing apps was deliberate, and this choice is proven right again and again. If you take employee experience, security, device TCO, and on-device AI capabilities in omnichannel retail seriously, this is a no-brainer. Days like this sharpen the thinking and remind us why the people and partnerships we invest in matter as much as the product we ship. 📍 Cupertino, CA

Last Friday, we opened the doors to something we normally keep behind them. Curious what the day looked like? Hit play. A select group of NERDs got an exclusive look at what we've been building at New Black, from checkout and loyalty to compliance, orchestration, and everything in between. It wasn't about showing off features. It was about sharing what we're seeing in the market, why we've built what we've built. About helping forward-thinking retailers understand how they can adapt faster. To stay ahead of changing customer expectations and build on the best foundation for what's next. And if you want a seat at the table next time, join the #NERDCommunity. Huge thanks to everyone who joined us, both in the room and online. #UnifiedCommerce #Omnichannel #RetailTech #NerdsAreTheNewBlack Omar Schieppati Vatsav Mudigonda Jasper Kusters Anne Michielsen Jerome Andro Panganiban Jesper Hult Eddie Reimer Moestafa Wagid Hosain Floris Heeg Jan-Willem van Setten Hanns-Christian Nicken Carlijn Schavemaker Peter Meall

And… That's a wrap on Friday’s product presentation! To show our appreciation for the people who share our passion for retail technology and our vision for where retail is heading, we opened a few seats for the most active members of the NERD. community. Hats off to everyone in the room. We build this with you. We kicked off with an intense Kahoot session to get everyone's spirits up, then walked through everything new and upgraded across the EVA App Suite (6 verticals!), plus the amazing story of a guard dog named TIM. Just a taste of what we heard around the room: "A good reason to be here. Nice to see other retailers have the same struggles, wishes and excitement. It opens things up a bit, it connects us." "Energized. I want it now, all of it." Want to be part of this? Sign up to join the #NERDCommunity, a place for people who can't stop thinking about the future of retail. #UnifiedCommerce #RetailTech #NerdsaretheNewBlack