Clothing companies are bringing their inventory-management systems to the sales floor in an effort to better track individual items in crowded spaces and complete more online orders in person.
American Eagle Outfitters Inc., Victoria’s Secret & Co., and Nordstrom Inc. are three retailers expanding their use of a new generation of radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips to narrow a supply chain information gap that widens when customers try on and move goods about a shop.
Approximately 500 American Eagle stores will be equipped with technology from the New York-based startup Radar that records things by reading RFID chips built into the price tags of the merchant. This was announced by American Eagle on Tuesday.
The technology used by Radar, according to its founder and chief executive Spencer Hewett, can spot where products, like a green T-shirt, may have been placed on a shelf with beige sweatshirts. This enables sales staff to direct customers to items more quickly and fill online orders for curbside pickup.
“If something’s missing from the sales floor, a sales associate knows where to go get it in the back,” Hewett said. “If a customer has moved into the fitting room and that’s the last of that particular type, they can very quickly locate it for another customer to say it’s no longer available,” he added.
Flat white discs with cameras that are fastened to the ceiling of a store are used by radar to track the merchandise. The gadgets are able to detect where customers are in the shop and read signals from paper-thin RFID tags affixed to price tags on clothing. The manufacturer claims that the technology functions with all RFID tags.
According to Radar, their software uses that data to display the exact locations of objects on a map with 99 per cent accuracy and a lag time of roughly 60 seconds on its smartphone app. Radar claims that the tags are not monitored past the shop readers.
RFID tags are being used by lingerie retailer Victoria’s Secret to give in-person customers access to more style possibilities. According to the business, it is introducing new store designs with RFID-enabled technology that can recognise products and use screens in changing rooms to show clients the numerous colours and sizes that are available. Clients can choose what they want to try on, and a staff member will deliver it to them.
In order to trace the clothing from the company’s logistical platforms to the point of sale, Inditex SA, the owner of fast-fashion behemoth Zara, started embedding RFID chips into the security tags of every item it sells in 2014. Inditex claims that by helping Zara position products at the ideal moment to prevent markdowns, the technology has increased sales of items at full price.
This year, Zara is launching a system that will replace hard anti-theft tags with RFID chips sewn into its clothing.
