If you’re going to demonstrate the power of “unified commerce,” you’ve got to have a unified event strategy to match. Such was the case for financial technology platform Adyen, which, with the help of its merchant partners, leveraged a widespread presence at NRF 2025 to give customers and prospects hands-on experience with its omnichannel payment solutions. From a striking booth inside the Javits Center, to hosting a high-profile panel, to OOH elements, to an off-site retreat, Adyen maintained a holistic design scheme and brand narrative across every touchpoint.
Exhibiting at NRF was a no-brainer for the company. The first fiscal quarter of the year is an important period for the retail industry, and Adyen was quick to pounce on the opportunity to get its brand in front of 40,000 attendees as a means of boosting awareness in North America—one of its fastest-growing regions—and engaging customers and prospective clients.
“Q1 is such a critical time for retailers as they go through their planning and possibly starting to think about changing payment processors, which can be a robust experience,” says Katie Uhlman, vp-global brand & p.r. at Adyen. “Knowing that, we’re getting people at the beginning of the year as they’re starting to think about, ‘What does the rest of this year look like, and what do our plans look like for next year?’ The opportunity and that timing was great.”
The brand’s vivid green booth beckoned visitors in with storefront-style architecture and window displays of visually arresting partner products, including Le Creuset’s luxury cookware and funky shoes from athletic apparel brand ON. The façade was inspired by Adyen’s Amsterdam-based headquarters, which features a street-level store where select merchant partners are invited to showcase their wares.
Inside the exhibit, sleek product displays and interactive demo stations highlighted brand partners Estée Lauder, Le Creuset and ON. The shop-inspired setting featured tangible touchpoints that showed how merchant partners use Adyen’s payment tech to bridge the gap between online and offline retail with tools like tap-to-pay solutions and AI-powered payment platforms. Adding to that story, across the NRF floor, other Adyen partners, like SAP, Microsoft and Oracle, featured their payment terminals in their exhibits.
“It was showing our reach,” Uhlman says. “We have so many wonderful partners that we work with, so it was a good opportunity for us to get more brand awareness in different booths, because some people who might go to Microsoft’s booth or Salesforce might not know us. And then seeing our terminals, they might say, ‘What’s Adyen?’ Then, they would come to our booth and check it out.”
Another standout element of the booth was the mini audience theater, where events and presentations were hosted. Among highlights, ON exhibited how it has integrated Adyen’s Uplift platform into its retail businesses, and Adyen’s APAC team delivered product presentations to Japanese delegations in Japanese.
Past the show floor proper, Adyen’s head of retail hosted an NRF panel alongside merchant partners Patagonia, Estée Lauder and Guess, which Uhlman says attracted a packed audience. (“One of the biggest reasons to be at shows like this is to have access to speaking opportunities,” she says.) And just outside the Javits Center, traditional billboards and a truck serving as a mobile billboard extended Adyen’s footprint.
Then at nearby Chelsea Industrial, the brand hosted an invite-only executive retreat that was designed to serve as an oasis away from the hustle and bustle of the show. The greenhouse-themed café environment mimicked many of the core design elements found in Adyen’s booth, while offering a slower pace, more space and a buffet of global cuisine that mapped back to the brand’s international reach.
The centerpiece of the off-site experience was an exclusive fireside chat between Roelant Prins, Adyen’s chief commercial officer, and Angela Ahrendts, former svp-retail at Apple, about the impact of unified commerce, the role of AI and the influence of evolving consumer expectations in retail.
Looking ahead, Adyen will take the same unified brand messaging and design motif to trade shows including the Merchant Risk Council, Shoptalk, NRF Europe and Money20/20, according to Uhlman. “All of the different iterations of this booth for this year, the look, and consistently hitting the same message, is really important for us,” she says. Partners: Factory360, off-site retreat; 3D Exhibits, booth fabrication.
More Scenes from Adyen’s NRF Booth and Executive Retreat:
Photo credit: Jenna Bascom Photography
