Retail stores

The apparel industry is a field where products are replaced at regular intervals, usually every 8-10 weeks. The product must be in the right place, at the right time, because it may not have another chance to sell. It is important to locate the model, color, size quickly. It is not enough to know that the merchandise is there, how many pieces of a particular product are available and where they are - you need to have this information immediately.

RFID technology streamlines processes in a clothing store and brings tangible benefits:

For the store's staff:

• allows quick receipt of ordered goods, e.g. a carton with 100 pieces of clothing can be received in less than a minute;
• allows quick daily inventory control at the time of closing the store (5,000 pieces of clothing in less than 15 minutes), during the count it is possible to alert about missing clothing that should be in stock or clothing that is lying in the wrong place and generate a list of products that the system identifies as possibly stolen because they have not been marked as sold;
• enables quick replenishment of unavailable garments thanks to knowledge of shortages, thus avoiding missed opportunities, reacting quickly and finding the right solution if it is, for example, an internal theft problem;
• provides statistics on the movement of items in the store, showing, for example, how many and what items were carried by customers to the fitting room and how many of them were sold;
• has anti-theft functions - a UHF RFID gate placed at the store exit can be completely invisible to the customer, for example, in the form of antennas suspended from the ceiling or hidden under the floor or in furniture. In addition, thanks to the unique tag number on a given piece of clothing, security not only receives information that an item is being carried out, but knows exactly that it is, for example, a green T-shirt in size L.

For the client:

• instant product localization - staff can instantly tell the customer where a particular item is located;
• better access to sizing information - RFID provides apparel customers with accurate and faster information about size and color availability;
• shorter waiting time to checkout - reading multiple garments at once instead of scanning each item individually, possibility of using automatic checkout machines;
• guarantee of product authenticity and originality thanks to the presence of the RFID tag.

In summary, it can be said that the main benefits of RFID implementation are:

• Improved availability of best-selling products,
• An increase in the number of products selling at full price,
• A reduction in the number of missing garment pieces due to theft and errors,
• reduction in the number of products ordered for stock.

Apparel companies that have chosen to implement RFID technology have achieved satisfactory results, despite focusing on different goals. Each company saw a return on investment in a relatively short period of time, as short as several months, and after an initial pilot program decided to expand RFID to their entire operations and all stores.

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