Cassandra Napoli, head of marketing and events at WGSN, joined NRF's Retail Gets Real podcast at NRF 2025: Retail's Big Show.
If you had a crystal ball to forecast retail’s future, what would you see? Coming to you from NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show, we’re joined by Cassandra Napoli, head of marketing and events at WGSN, to tackle that question. Find out about emerging trends that may surprise you, ways to future-proof your business and how to best serve young consumers.
Trend forecasters like Napoli help retailers peek into the minds of consumers and anticipate what’s coming next. “With trend forecasting, you're part anthropologist, part sociologist, part psychologist,” Napoli says. “You're understanding consumer behavior at its core and connecting signals of change and distilling them down into actionable strategies across lots of different industries.”
Explore more of the big trends futurist Cassandra Napoli spoke about at NRF 2025.
According to Napoli, there is a crucial difference between trend forecasting and trend tracking. Social media channels like TikTok make fleeting trends pop up and disappear quickly. “A lot of the stuff that bubbles up on the internet is very much trend tracking,” she says. “Trend forecasting is looking at those shifts and saying, ‘What does this mean for retailers?’ It’s based on lots of other signals, data, consumer insights and speaking to focus groups.”
You can’t talk about retail trends without bringing artificial intelligence into the conversation. It’s transforming the future of retail — for better or worse. Napoli believes it can be both at the same time.
“AI could be really good for retail and AI could also be very threatening to retail. It’s about learning to coexist alongside technology. We call it the harmony of convergence,” she says. “We can use AI to our advantage, letting it do the work for us and freeing us up to have imaginative thinking and be able to be creative and play in the workplace, which is crucial in the next couple years.”
This kind of playful, out-of-the-box thinking is especially important for an emerging trend called “strategic joy.” Napoli notes that consumers are increasingly embracing fun and frivolity as an antidote to the serious woes of today’s world.
“We're starting to see this real appetite for brand strategies and content strategies that are very unserious. For example, beauty brands that are packaged in a ketchup container or something like that,” Napoli says. “In a world where AI is coming for us and we have negative news articles and geopolitical tensions every day of the week, having a moment of joyful absurdity is going to take consumers and really carry us into 2027.”
The children are the future … of retail. Napoli is keenly tracking “Zalphas,” a fringe generation of tweens that falls between Gen Z and Alphas.
“I think paying attention to this generation is absolutely crucial,” she says. “If you go into a Sephora, Ulta or any type of makeup store, there are 9- to 14-year-olds touching everything and grabbing everything. They're real active buyers. They're a unique consumer group that I don't think we've ever seen before because they're the most informed micro-generation we've ever had, and I think they already know so much about luxury brands and mass market. They are active connoisseurs of makeup and fashion, and I think it would be really silly not to pay attention to them.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more about the trends you should be keeping your eye on.
(00:01:21) Napoli’s career as a trend forecaster
How she landed at WGSN
What trend forecasting is
How to keep up with the ever-changing trends
Trend tracking vs. trend forecasting
(00:04:55) How to forecast trends
How Napoli tracks trends in Gen Z behavior
What if TikTok goes away?
Niche as the new norm
The pillars of trend forecasting
(00:08:23) Emerging trends for retailers to watch
How AI can be both beneficial and threatening
Generational trends coming up for Alphas and Betas
How to future-proof your business
(00:13:09) Embracing strategic joy
Creating moments of play in retail stores
Taking unserious marketing strategies seriously
(00:15:04) The biggest trend no one is talking about
What is “wither will”?
The antidote to hustle culture
Why sales of “dumb phones” are rising
De-cluttering our digital lives
(00:19:52) The future of retail is tweens
Why we should be paying attention to the “Zalpha” generation
Tweens as active buyers and retail connoisseurs
(00:21:38) Napoli’s best career advice
Finding mentors you admire
What Napoli wants to learn more about
Getting into the minds of young consumers
Learn more about WGSN
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