Kait Stephens

Helping brands bridge offline & online commerce 🔁 | Omnichannel Queen 👑 | Host of the Omnichannel Marketer podcast 🎙️ | CEO & Co-Founder @ Brij 🌉 | Angel Investor

👋👋👋 I’m Kait the CEO and Founder of BRIJ! My friends call me the queen of Omnichannel 👑. I also host a podcast called the Omnichannel Marketer 🎙️. 

My background is in Omnichannel Retail and Ecommerce. I help brands solve the pain of having no connection, relationship, or insights from buyers coming through retail and marketplace channels.

I share Omnichannel strategy and best practices. 

And I founded BRIJ, a platform for brands to build Omnichannel Experiences - a new digital touch point in physical channels to communicate key messages, collect 1st party data, and drive reorder.

If you ever want to talk Omichannel, the future of retail, connected experience, or QR codes, I’m happy to chat any time!

CEO & Co-Founder

Brij is building the infrastructure to "bridge" online & offline channels.

Do you know anything about the people who purchased your product at Retail or on Amazon today?

It is a simple, powerful question. That no one in consumer marketing can answer. 

Retail and Marketplace are black box channels… until now.

Where most consumer brands see darkness, Brij sees a new brand touch point, a communication channel, access to customers (and associated data), and new marketing opportunities. 

Brij is an Omnichannel Marketing platform that empowers brands to bridge the offline & online gap to create a connected on-brand experience that provides more value to buyers. 

And helps marketers to know who purchased what, when, and where - every day, in real-time, 24/7/365.

Pinch me, Brij was just featured by Forrester.

We spent the first half of this week at NRF, where we were featured in the Innovators Showcase.

This group consists of 50 brands handpicked by NRF for being the most forward-thinking companies with the latest and greatest in retail tech.

Following the event, Forrester just released its report, 2026 NRF New York Innovators Showcase: Retail Tech Companies To Watch.

I’m incredibly honored to see Brij recognized in both.

The NRF Innovators Showcase isn’t a popularity contest. The Innovation Advisory Committee - which includes Forrester - evaluates companies based on things like:
- how relevant the problem is for retailers
- whether the solution is already working in real-world environments
- and if the technology is truly ready to scale

The Forrester report puts a clear lens on why these companies were selected. Collectively, it highlights a major shift from “predictive” retail, aka forecasting what might happen, to “agentic” retail technology that autonomously executes actions to shape outcomes.

That framing really resonated with me.

At Brij, we’ve spent years focused on moments most brands don’t fully see: purchases that happen in third-party retail channels, post-purchase touchpoints, and offline interactions that still drive enormous value. Our belief has always been that insight alone isn’t enough. What matters is what you can do with it.

Seeing that philosophy reflected so clearly in this report - and across this group of innovators - is incredibly validating for our team.

Grateful to National Retail Federation, Forrester, and the broader retail community pushing the industry forward in practical, customer-first ways.

Thank you to the authors: Sucharita Kodali with Fiona Swerdlow, Delilah G.

And especially proud of the Brij team for the work that led us here. 💙
Zack Morrison, Alec Shah, Genevieve Flynn, Patricia Riegel, Nicole D’Amore, Sarah (Davidson) Molloy, Javin Chan, Whitney Hudson, Tim Mattessich, Cara Felleman, Gui Groscos, Arielle Halldin, Emma Laffey, Julia Lang, Alexa Kilroy, Audrey Buck, Paul Piazza, AJ Hoke, Lisa Smith, Stephanie Peters, Harsh Chaudhary, Jake Cable, Sush Ravish, Diego Silva Valencia, Erick Casteneda, Felipe Maté, Lorenzo Sozzi, Denis Kuria, Qalb Hussain, Eren Yar, Arshdeep Singh, Madhur Jain, Ali Arshad, Arqam Saeed, Usman Zahid, Zoofishan Khan Hussain, Haris Ali, Maryam Afnan, Alina Arshad, Marwah Khurshid, Muhammed Zahid, Bilal Qamar, Vic de Guzman.

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Top Commerce Voice 🛍️ | RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert | Mama x2 👶🏼| Omnichannel Queen 👑 | Omnichannel Marketer Podcast Host 🎙️ | CEO & Co-Founder @ Brij 🌉

Back by popular demand…

the jumpsuits. 💙

The easiest way to be remembered at a conference? 

Wear your brand

I will die on this hill. 

In a sea of 40k professionals at NRF…

✔️You need a way to stand out
✔️To be remembered 
✔️To be easy to find

This jumpsuit cost me < $100. 

- Marketers compliment me. 
- Prospects remember me. 
- People find us in a sea of the same

I will admit…

- the occasional person asks me if I’m a doctor
- and I do feel a little (sometimes a lot) silly

But nothing gets you past feeling silly than business impact. 

Great seeing so many friends & partners at NRF!

Aaron Schwartz Nicole Harvey Whitney Hudson Tim Mattessich Emma Laffey Alexa Kilroy Cory Officer Joe Cano Catherine Clark Nathaniel Horenstein Brij

I’m at NRF, where Shopify + Google just announced a major partnership that’s quietly laying the groundwork for a fundamental shift in how commerce works.

Here’s the headline I can’t stop thinking about:

AI agents are going to shop for us.

Not “someday.” Soon.

A few takeaways I’m processing in real time:
1️⃣ A unified context protocol = a shared language so commerce systems, platforms, and agents can actually talk to each other (think: Model Context Protocol, but for commerce).

2️⃣ Infrastructure is being built for AI agents to browse, compare, and buy on behalf of humans.

3️⃣ Your website? Still important, but no longer the center of the universe.

4️⃣ Brands now need to optimize for AEO / GEO (how agents find, understand, and choose products).

5️⃣ Native checkout inside LLMs is coming, which means attribution, performance marketing, and discovery are all about to get… interesting.

The biggest unlock, though?

👉 First-party data + agent-ready assets will separate the brands that get surfaced from the ones that disappear.

This is one of the fastest-growing ways consumers will discover products, and it’s happening whether we’re ready or not.

Curious how others are thinking about agentic commerce right now: are you experimenting yet, or still just trying to wrap your head around it?

Here's our monthly tech tools roundup (from your favorite AI-obsessed tech startup) 👇🏼

We’ve been tightening our internal workflow at Brij this quarter, and it’s changed how fast the team can move. 

We don't add more software just for the sake of using AI. We use it strategically by connecting everything we already rely on.

Here are the tools driving the biggest impact this month I'd recommend for any founders or companies looking to create more efficiency:

1️⃣ Cape

Cape maps warm connections and prioritizes intros worth pursuing.
It scores relationship strength, flags founders who match our ICP, and surfaces paths we wouldn’t find manually. It's become a core part of how our sales and partnerships teams expand outreach WITHOUT getting buried in spreadsheets!

2️⃣ Bear (YC F25)

Bear shows us how AI systems describe Brij and our partner brands.
It pulls the exact attributes that appear when shoppers use AI for product discovery. This has helped us a ton with refine positioning across AEO and conversational search channels.

3️⃣ Custom GPTs

GPTs are our lifesavers. We built internal GPTs for Sales, Marketing, Product, and Ops, trained on our own docs and workflows.

Sales uses them for call prep and summarization.
Marketing uses them for structured brainstorming and repurposing.
Product uses them to merge customer insights across channels.
Ops uses them to draft and optimize SOPs.

They've quickly become our centralized source of operational knowledge.

4️⃣ Connected Workspaces

We've connected Slack, Drive, and our internal MCPs directly into ChatGPT. Because of this, we've been able to eliminate most of the tab switching that was slowing the team down. One question now brings up the exact file, message, or doc we need.

There you have it! Our favorite tech tools we're experimenting with at Brij while we bring AI-driven omnichannel solutions to our favorite retail brands. 

Do you like seeing these tech tool roundups? Let me know!

Brij

Cape

Bear (YC F25)

4 tech tools we're using at Brij

A+ customer experience by Jolie. 

Excited for Brij to be a small part of this journey.

Thanks for sharing Michael Ludwig

Director, Collector Experience at Fanatics | Customer Experience Transformation | CRM, BPO & Automation Strategy

I stopped by my local Costco Wholesale this weekend (no surprise to people that know me) and was surprised to see they’d just stocked the Jolie shower head.

I was there with my mother-in-law, and she said she’d buy it if I installed it. Easy deal. I genuinely enjoy putting things together.

From the moment I opened the box, it was obvious that real thought went into the customer experience. Everything felt intentional.

Right on top was a simple, interactive install guide with two QR codes. The first took me to a Brij-powered page with a short install video and a clear path to more detailed instructions. The second led to warranty registration that was fast and painless.

Even the small details stood out. The Teflon tape was labeled “the cutest tape in the world.” The adjustable wrench had markings showing the exact width needed for the shower head. No guessing. No frustration.

This is a great example of a brand understanding how people actually feel about home projects and removing every bit of friction they can. Clear guidance, thoughtful design, and just enough
 personality to make it feel approachable.

Hats off to the Jolie team.

Side note: What’s funny is the photo I’m posting isn’t even of the shower head.

The experience around it is what stuck with me.

#cx #customerexperience

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