Italian RFID Lab Gets Fashion-Forward

Another of the RFID Lab's pilot programs involves Ley Tricot, a contract clothing manufacturer whose clients include Calvin Klein and Trussardi. The lab worked with the company to test whether it could embed RFID tags into clothing labels—rather than merely attaching them to hangtags—to better track the items through production and its shipping process. The lab attached a UPM Raflatac EPC Gen 2 tag, called the Web, to a label that was then sewn onto knitwear and put through industrial laundering and ironing processes.

The laundry processes included submersion in detergent and fabric softener, as well as exposure to temperatures of up to 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) for up to two hours. The ironing process exposed tags to 98 degree Celsius (208 degrees Fahrenheit) heat for up to 30 seconds at a time.

These tests, Montanari says, showed that the tags could still function after going through the manufacturing process. The next part of the Ley Tricot pilot test involved reading the tags in order to pick and ship orders. (The clothing manufacturer currently employs bar-coded labels for this process.)

The results of the tag readability tests, Montanari claims, were "excellent." The project's next phase, he says—which the lab plans to commence later this year—will be to utilize the tags to track the apparel items through production stages. Ley Tricot hopes this will improve its production-tracking process by reducing labor, since the production batches would be tracked automatically by an infrastructure of RFID readers, rather than manually, using handheld bar-code scanners.

In addition, the RFID Lab has already begun a number of pilot studies to explore the use of RFID in food and cold chain applications. These include one project in which pork products are being tracked and monitored in real time (see Parma's RFID Lab Plans Pork Pilot).