American Apparel Makes a Bold Fashion Statement With RFID

At the pilot store, however, an interrogator at the point of sale reads each garment's RFID tag as it is rung up, and this data is transmitted to the Vue software, which triggers an alert on a computer monitor in the stock room as soon as the item is sold. A worker then pulls that garment—or a number of them, depending on how frequently sales are made. As items are brought to the sales floor, a reader antenna mounted around the doorway between the stock room and sales floor reads their tags and sends this information to the software, which then updates the stock's location to the sales floor.

For the pilot, employees at the Columbia University store have been utilizing a pool of Avery Dennison AD-220 EPC Gen 2 passive tags, attaching them to items of clothing as they are received from its manufacturing center in Los Angeles. But as the company moves from pilot to deployment, it plans to bring the tagging of items back to the point of manufacture. Workers at the L.A. manufacturing facility will attach RFID-enabled hangtags containing Avery Dennison AD-220 EPC Gen 2 passive inlay to each item of clothing as it is packaged, and an EPC encoded to each garment will be associated with that item's style, size and color.

As shipments leave the distribution center, Motorola XR440 fixed interrogators at the dock doors will read a hand-applied EPC Gen 2 shipping label attached to each case of items, which will then be associated with EPCs encoded to all item tags within that case. All of this data—the case and item EPCs and read events showing timestamps and reader locations—will be transmitted to Vue's TrueVue software platform.

As the tagged cases of product are received at a retail store, another Motorola XR440 fixed interrogator will collect the EPC data and send it to the Vue software running at the store, which will reconcile the received goods with an advance shipment notice sent by the factory. The Vue software will then add the goods to store inventory. Employees will use Motorola MC9090-G RFID handheld readers to take periodic inventory of all items on the sales floor, as they have been doing during the Columbia University store pilot.

Signage in the pilot store lets customers know RFID tags are attached to items for inventory-tracking purposes, but because the tags are removed from items at the point of purchase for reuse, no customers leave the store with tags still attached to their garments. The RFID hangtags will remain on sold clothing, however, once the retailer begins rolling out the technology at its other stores, since tags won't be recollected and reused. As of press time, American Apparel has not responded to questions from regarding whether it plans to render the tags unreadable before customers leave with their purchases.

To date, Adams says, American Apparel has placed an initial order with Avery for 1 million RFID hangtags to supply the 17-store rollout. "But that's only expected to last maybe six months," he says, "so on an annual basis, and as the company expands to stores beyond New York, this will represent many millions of tags."