Vazen's Double Win at IIEX Europe Comes With a New Name and a Bigger Vision

Formerly known as VST, the retail data platform swept both the Audience Favorite and Industry Impact Awards at IIEX Europe 2026 — and then, weeks later, rebranded to match the company it had already become.

I announced the Industry Impact Award myself, on stage at IIEX Europe. "While we can't speak for every audience vote, we can speak to what Greenbook saw: a company turning something often treated as an operational asset into a source of strategic intelligence," I told the room. "An innovation that had a clear path to changing how our industry works in practice. This company found insight hiding in a place most of us weren't looking. By unlocking insight from planogram and retail execution data, they are helping organizations make smarter decisions using information they already have."

The recipient of both the Audience Favorite Award and the Industry Impact Award, I announced, was VST — the London-based retail data company founded by Nick Theodore and Josh Evans. Theodore and Evans met at dunnhumby, where they watched retailers and brands do increasingly sophisticated things with customer data while the shelf itself, the place where most of those decisions actually land, stayed largely untested.

In 2016, the pair set out to fix that with Virtual Store Trials: a way to put real shoppers in front of a realistic virtual shelf and test a layout or a launch in days rather than months, with evidence a retailer would accept (The Grocer). Nine years and millions of rows of shelf and planogram data later, that idea has grown well past its original name. In late July, just weeks after the IIEX Europe win, the company made it official: VST became Vazen.

"Category decisions worth millions were being made on small samples and gut feel, because the alternative, a live in-store trial, is slow, expensive and hard to read," Theodore says of the problem that started it all, in an email interview with Greenbook. "If you can put a real shopper in front of a realistic virtual shelf, you can test a launch or a layout in days instead of months, with evidence a retailer will actually accept."

How VST Grew Beyond Virtual Store Trials

That thesis has since expanded well beyond its original product. "The company has built out from that to bring to the fore the planogram data side of the business, which is where we see the growth coming from," Theodore says. Vazen now spans live planogram data, category analytics, an AI data foundation, and a conversational analytics layer called Ask Vazen, sitting on top of nine years of continuously collected shelf data.

What Winning Both IIEX Europe Awards Meant

Ask Theodore what the awards meant, though, and he doesn't reach for the product roadmap first. He reaches for how it felt to hear the news. "We are in reality heads-down in the work, client projects, the data, the platform, so we rarely take the time to really step back and ask how it reads from the outside," he says. "Winning the Industry Impact Award and the Audience Favorite on the same day answered that question quite emphatically that what we are doing is the right thing."

The two awards landed differently, and Theodore is precise about why. The Industry Impact Award, decided by Greenbook's leadership, felt like validation from people who track what has the potential to work across the industry, not just what's polished in a pitch. "I think as well we often feel like a lone voice," he says. "We talk about shoppers when everyone else talks about consumers, we are building out a new category in the retail world, when other innovation sits in making the existing approaches better, and being a lone voice can make you feel isolated. Being recognized by the award made me feel like we were going the right way, not just in our commercial success but from the industry too."

The Audience Favorite win carried a different weight entirely. "The audience vote win was also special, came from practitioners, people who do this work every day," Theodore says. "That felt less like a trophy and more like the industry agreeing that yes, this matters."

Building AI on Evidence, Not Hype

Winning twice in a crowded, hype-saturated field is its own kind of statement, and Theodore is candid about the discipline it has taken to get there. "Every vendor now claims AI, and buyers are rightly fatigued by it," he says. "Our discipline has been to only claim what works today, with evidence, and to show it running rather than talk about where the field is going. That's harder than it sounds when the market rewards big promises."

The pace of the underlying technology doesn't make that easier, he adds, which is why Vazen has leaned on its own foundation rather than the latest model release. "The underlying technology moves monthly, so you have to build on foundations that hold. For us that is the nine years of continuous shelf and planogram data which allows us to build strong foundations. We are trying to be AI agnostic to allow clients to use the data more easily within their businesses."

That foundation is really the heart of the Industry Impact story — the same one I pointed to on stage, an operational asset that Vazen has spent nearly a decade turning into a strategic one. When I put that framing to Theodore directly, he traced it back to what a planogram actually is. "The planogram is the closest thing retail has to a record of where purchase decisions actually happen," he says. "It tells you what a shopper saw, next to what, at what height, in which store, and it was sitting in operational systems being used for compliance and little else."

Connect that record to sales data and shopper testing, he says, and companies stop guessing at cause and effect and start seeing what changed on the shelf and what happened as a result. "The conviction came from clients' reactions the first time they saw their own category that way." Getting retailers to see the same value took longer than the technology did. "I think even five years ago retailers didn't think planogram data was 'worth selling,' so the job to convince them was slower. The pace of sales into retailers is speeding up and that gives us more conviction to keep moving."

Why VST Became Vazen

The rebrand, Theodore says, wasn't a reaction to the award so much as a decision the company had already been building toward. "Virtual Store Trials described our first product, and we'd grown well beyond it," he says. "The award gave us external confirmation that the industry sees the bigger platform, and the confidence to name it properly."

There's a practical upside too, particularly as Vazen pushes further into the US market. "Enterprise buyers are skeptical of AI claims, and independent recognition from the insights industry carries weight in those rooms."

What Comes Next for Vazen

Looking ahead, Theodore points to Ask Vazen as the product he's most excited about, and specifically its evolution from answering questions to acting on them. "Today a category manager can ask a shelf question in plain language and get an evidenced answer in seconds; the next step is that the same conversation produces the output, the analysis, the planogram change, the retailer-ready deck." Alongside that, the team is deepening its data foundation "to move us to a more predictive space," while also investing in stronger visualization for retailer sell-ins, 3D testing, and its US buildout.

Zoom out further, and Theodore's ambition for the category is bigger than any one product. "I'm excited about shelf testing stopping being a special project and becoming a standard gate, the same way no serious business ships software without testing it," he says. "When evidence is available in days rather than months, there's no excuse to launch on gut feel."

He also wants to close a gap he sees between two disciplines that, in his view, shouldn't be so far apart. "I'm excited about insight moving to where decisions are executed: the shelf. We need to make sure shopper and consumer research aren't so far away from each other. For years the industry produced brilliant analysis that died in a slide deck. When the data, the test and the planogram live on one foundation, the insight and the execution are finally the same motion."

Asked for a final thought, Theodore returns to the idea that has carried the company from a two-person startup at dunnhumby to a double award winner with a new name. "Our vision is a retail industry where category growth is built on shared data and powered by AI," he says. "The biggest gains in this industry come when retailers and brands work from the same evidence rather than negotiating from separate versions of the truth. That's what we're building the foundation for, and the award tells us the industry is ready for it."

He adds one more hope for the industry itself: "We'd also love to have more retailer, category, and shopper voices in this industry. The shelf is where so many decisions are made, but much research, and therefore presence within conferences, sits away from it."