Team of Athena Studio at NRF 2026 New York Credits: NRF 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…
