NRF Europe Day Two: Zabka, Arket, Westwing and Continente

Day two of NRF Europe's Retail's Big Show brought together four very different retail stories, a Polish convenience chain preparing for continental ambition, a panel debating where experience ends and entertainment begins, a digital-native design brand explaining why it went physical, and a grocery partnership built on letting customers, not head office, decide what works. Different sectors, different scales, but a shared thread ran underneath all four sessions: growth that lasts is built on discipline, not speed for its own sake.

From cost function to continental leader

Fifteen years ago, Żabka was a Polish corner store chain built almost entirely around one metric: cost. The priority, according to Tomasz Blicharski, the group's Chief Strategy and Development Officer and incoming Group Chief Executive Officer from January 2027, was to keep costs as low as possible, a discipline that supported roughly 200 store openings a year at the time.

That model has since evolved considerably. In the years since being acquired by CVC Capital Partners, Żabka has opened around 1,400 stores in the past year alone and remodelled 4,000 existing locations to serve a younger customer base whose share of the chain's shoppers has doubled. Blicharski was candid that the shift was not smooth. Early trials, first in 10 stores, then 50, then several hundred, exposed a hard truth: assortment and store layout could not simply be copied from one location to the next. Every store, he said, effectively needed its own planogram, a realisation that required conviction to act on at scale.

Execution improved with repetition. Store conversions that initially took three weeks were eventually reduced to five to seven days, but only after two and a half years of trial and error. Technology played a growing role throughout, and Blicharski pointed out that Żabka was working with data long before the term AI became common, when the same techniques were simply called big data. That data first shaped commercial decisions behind the scenes, then moved into the consumer app to personalise offers, and has now extended to agentic tools supporting employees and franchisees, particularly as a way of managing rising labour costs.

The wider ecosystem Żabka has built, including rapid delivery, traces back to a single mission, making customers' lives easier without losing money in the process. With 13,000 stores in Poland today and a target of 20,000, alongside continued expansion in Romania at a rate of around 200 stores a year, Żabka's next phase looks set to test how far that model travels beyond its home market.

Where experience becomes entertainment, and where it doesn't

If Żabka's session was about scale, the panel on experiential retail was about restraint. Jesper Magnusson of Arket and Laure Kruithof of Aroma-Zone were asked to name the single word that would define their businesses in 2026. Kruithof chose transparency. Magnusson chose human connection. Neither mentioned technology.

Aroma-Zone's business began as a DIY proposition, raw ingredients that customers could mix into their own skincare, built on affordability. As time became a scarcer resource for shoppers, finished products grew alongside that original range, but the underlying principle held. With 48 stores across France, Belgium and the United Kingdom, and a customer base that is now 25 per cent male, Kruithof said the brand's central challenge is consistency between online and offline, ensuring that whatever a customer expects from the website is matched by knowledgeable, well-trained staff in store. Trust, she argued, matters more than any single transaction.

Magnusson framed Arket's position more directly, describing a shift across retail from transactional to relational. Rather than competing purely on convenience, Arket sees every point of sale as a point of relationship, with the ambition of earning a place in customers' everyday routines rather than simply their shopping lists. Both speakers agreed that technology should support this shift rather than define it. Magnusson was clear that any tool without demonstrable value risks distracting from the experience rather than enhancing it.

Asked where brands most often go wrong when introducing experiential elements, both speakers converged on the same underlying warning. Kruithof cautioned against confusing experience with entertainment, noting that a customer walking into a store usually wants an answer, not a show, and that entertainment alone rarely builds a lasting relationship. Magnusson pointed to a related risk, experiential additions that stray from a brand's core identity. However novel they appear, he said, elements that do not align with what a brand stands for undermine trust rather than build it.

The moat that cannot be copied online

Few speakers put the case for physical retail as bluntly as Andreas Hoerning, Chief Executive Officer of Westwing, who opened his session at NRF Europe with a simple observation: everything online is easy to copy. That, he argued, is precisely why Westwing has spent the past several years building out its offline presence, despite being a digital-native business from the outset.

The company's evolution began with curation, moving from a highly localised, operationally complex retail model towards design credibility built on its existing social and retail following. Westwing now positions itself as a genuine design product brand, with services such as home consultations sitting alongside its e-commerce core. Behind the scenes, the business simplified considerably, becoming Shopify's largest enterprise customer in Europe, reducing the size of its internal technology team, and building select tools in house only where doing so made clear commercial sense.

Hoerning gave three reasons for the decision to open physical stores. Large purchases, he explained, involve many touchpoints, and reducing friction across them builds buyer confidence. Physical space also builds brand affinity in ways online cannot; Westwing has even developed a signature scent used across its stores. Most importantly, in his view, offline retail is genuinely difficult to build well, which is exactly what makes it valuable. A moat, he argued, only counts as a moat if it is hard to copy, and copying a physical retail experience is far harder than copying a website.

Ten stores now operate under this strategy, beginning in Germany for operational simplicity and expanding into cities such as Paris for their audience and relevance. Hoerning was equally clear about the discipline required to sustain this approach. Online continues to fund the business, offline builds the relationship, and Westwing deliberately avoids overinvesting in physical retail before it has proven its place. Asked how the company plans to stay relevant as AI reshapes retail, Hoerning argued that any brand with genuine relevance has no real choice but to stay a step ahead of the market, adding that no AI system yet available can replace a strong creative director. Cultural relevance, he said, still has to be earned locally, market by market, partnership by partnership.

On what a premium customer now expects, Hoerning's conclusion tied the session together. Excellence has to be visible at every touchpoint, he argued, starting with a genuinely unique assortment, extending through elevated digital and physical experiences, and finishing with services, such as Westwing's interior design consultations, that follow the customer wherever they are, whether that is in store, online or at home.

Letting the customer decide

The day's final session paired Guilherme Cardoso, Head of E-commerce at Sonae MC, which operates the Continente brand, with Ryan Hamburger, Chief Commercial Officer at Instacart, to discuss what it takes to build a genuinely connected grocery experience. Between them, they offered a line that captured much of the day's broader theme: the problem is almost always the same, the answer rarely is. Cardoso noted that Continente has managed to strike a balance over recent years, improving customer satisfaction and profitability at the same time, rather than treating the two as a trade-off.

Continente has operated grocery e-commerce since 2001, but customer expectations have shifted meaningfully in recent years, Cardoso explained. Shoppers no longer accept a trade-off between speed and quality; they expect both simultaneously. That pressure was a direct driver behind the retailer's move into quick commerce, which is fulfilled entirely by in-store staff. The central operational challenge, Cardoso said, is minimising friction on that side of the business without customers ever noticing the effort involved.

Across its various banners and formats, Continente's guiding principle is to let the customer decide, placing products across as many touchpoints as realistically possible and allowing genuine demand, rather than internal assumptions, to determine what belongs where. Cardoso noted that this approach has occasionally revealed that a product simply does not suit a particular banner, information the retailer would not have uncovered otherwise. Early wins from this data-led approach included price differentiation and a rethink of the picking experience, work that runs alongside delivery partnerships with services such as Uber Eats and Glovo.

Both speakers were emphatic that technology alone does not explain Continente's progress. Hamburger described technology as an enabler rather than a differentiator in its own right, arguing that the real advantage comes from linking culture, process and technology together, and that the more touchpoints a retailer builds well, the more a customer tends to spend with them. On the technical side, both acknowledged the tension of modernising systems built up over decades, legacy infrastructure layered incrementally over time, with no universal answer as to whether such systems should be broken apart or built upon further. Their shared conclusion for the years ahead was less about finding a single fixed strategy than about building the organisational capacity for continuous learning, and staying flexible enough to keep adapting as conditions change.