There’s a version of NRF you don’t see in the LinkedIn photo dumps. It happens on the Saturday night in an Irish bar on West 34th that’s still dressed for Christmas in the second week of January, pint glasses catching the light from a string of fairy lights nobody’s bothered to take down yet. Chris Bousquet walked into The Joyce, ordered a beer, and we picked up exactly where we’d left off in Dublin fourteen months earlier and a virtual chat whilst I was in Kileavy Castle in October. That’s the thing with some people. Time doesn’t really do anything to the conversation.
Since this episode was recorded, Chris has become a father for the second time. I want to flag that up top, because everything in the twenty-odd minutes that followed makes more sense once you know it. A man who talks with the quiet conviction of someone who has thought a lot about what home should feel like, and is now in the business of building it again, in real time, for a small person who will grow up inside it.
The first time I met Chris was 2024, in a room in Dublin that was struggling to breathe. Irish brands pitching to US buyers, nobody quite sure what to say. The buyers were giving nothing away. The brands were second-guessing themselves. The temperature dropping by the minute. Chris jumped in with feedback. Unsolicited, generous, sharp. He provided the oxygen in a room that needed it.
That’s the starting point for this conversation. Empathy. Where does it come from, how do you sustain it in a professional context, and is it the thing that actually separates the people who last from the people who don’t.
Chris’s answer is grounded in loss. Small family, members going too soon, and the way those absences shaped his instinct to bridge. Through loss, empathy materialises. It’s a sentence that does a lot of work. What he’s describing is the process of turning grief into a professional operating system without ever naming it as such. The curiosity that comes from it, the reflex to bring people into a conversation rather than hold them outside of it, is not a trick he learned at sales school.
He pushed back when I suggested the constant curiosity must be exhausting. A self-proclaimed introvert with some extrovert quality, he framed it as quality over quantity. Depth over reach. A wallflower at the corner of the bar until you put him in a room with a clear purpose, at which point he turns on and goes. I recognised the description immediately. Half the best operators I know work that way. The ones who don’t are usually selling something.
Then he dropped the line I’ve been thinking about ever since. He name-checked Mary Beech from Kate Spade, the marketer who took a customer persona and turned her into someone called the Kate Girl. A twenty-something who would spend a whole paycheck on a lamp, eat cake for breakfast, and aspired to travel the world. No cohort language. No demographic slicing. A person.
