Who stands behind the standard

About RBSI

The Retail Brands Standard Index is developed and maintained by Squarefeet, published as an open standard, and shaped by expert review from across the industry it serves.

Origin

Built from operating experience.

RBSI was developed by Squarefeet, the company behind Retail Brands — a brand intelligence platform that evaluates retail brands globally against this framework's 40 DNA IDs to produce a daily brand intelligence profile. The framework is not a theoretical construct; it is the live architecture behind those evaluations.

Why publish it openly

A standard has to belong to the market.

A framework perceived as proprietary to one company will not become a shared standard — it will remain a product feature. Squarefeet publishes RBSI as an open methodology, independent of the Retail Brands product, because its authority has to come from the quality of the methodology and the credibility of the people who have reviewed it, not from who built it first.

Governance

How the standard is maintained.

Squarefeet is the sole maintainer of RBSI. It owns the versioning process, publishes the change log, and takes final responsibility for what the framework says. The Founding Review Panel is an expert review body, not a co-governing one — its role is to validate, challenge, and lend credibility to the framework, and every panel seat is renewed at each annual version, with founding members offered priority re-invitation.

Validation

The framework is built from operating experience, which produces rigour but does not guarantee it reflects how brands, operators, investors, and lenders actually experience the problems it addresses. Panel review validates that alignment, or identifies where it is missing.

Challenge

Every pillar, signal category, and scoring dimension is open to expert challenge. Disagreements are documented and either incorporated or rebutted in the public change log — a feature of the process, not a flaw in it.

Credibility

The retail industry adopts a standard when people it respects — across every stakeholder category the standard serves — have reviewed and put their name to it.

The Founding Review Panel

Eleven positions, eleven perspectives.

The panel spans the stakeholder categories RBSI is built to serve — brought together to stress-test the framework against how their part of the market actually operates.

Mall Leasing Director

Brand C-Suite

Bank Research Executive

Independent Brand Expert

PE Principal

Data / Methodology Specialist

Non-Western Market Expert

Specialty Leasing Expert

DNVB Chief Executive

Senior Property Advisor

Franchise & Licensing Expert

License

CC BY-SA 4.0.

RBSI is published under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 — a deliberate choice, not a default one. It keeps the standard free to use, adapt, and build on, while the ShareAlike clause prevents anyone from forking it into a closed, proprietary version. Any derivative of RBSI has to remain as open as the original.

Attribution

Contribution travels with the document.

Founding Review Partner credit is embedded permanently in the framework document itself, so it travels with the standard wherever it is redistributed under the license — in the document, in the version change log, and in the public record of who shaped it.