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A Conversation With Avery Dennison's James Stafford
The garments' EPC Gen 2 tags are read, and the contents of the box are compared with the information on the packing list. Once the system notifies workers that the carton's contents are correct, they sort garments based on orders and ship those out to retailers. Large retailers that already have RFID systems in place, such as Karstadt and Metro, can use their systems to read the tags upon receipt of the garment. At a Karstadt store, for instance, the items' tags are read upon receiving with a gate reader, as they are moved to stockrooms and when they are moved to the store floor.
Q: How many tags will Seidensticker use per year?
A: Seidensticker is expected to tag 4 million shirts in 2010, and eventually all 13 million shirts it produces under various brands each year. Seidensticker uses the AD-826 inlay, which was developed by Avery Dennison. Avery Dennison prints and encodes tags at its service offices in Hong Kong, Vietnam, India and Germany, and delivers the tags to Seidensticker factories to be attached to finished garments.
Q: What sort of new business cases and uses do you foresee for RFID, especially by retailers? Do you see any developing trends?
A: The new business cases for RFID are all about using item-level tags for a variety of purposes throughout the supply chain—from the source to the consumer. This can be summarized as a "one tag/many functions" strategy.
The Seidensticker project is an example of this, since the individual items are read at various points throughout the supply chain, and then ultimately in the retail store. Previously, people might have thought of doing this using larger RFID tags on pallets or cartons. Today, you can do it using item-level tags.
Another new use is RFID for improving the customer experience in the store. When a customer approaches an RFID-equipped mirror or screen with a tagged garment, this can trigger an automatic display of matching items, available sizes, suitable accessories or even a video of a model wearing the item. This is an area of enormous development potential, as the use of RFID tags becomes more widespread. One company active in this area is Thebigspace [see Magicmirror Could Assist Retail Customers].
Q: Anything else?
A: A fast-developing application is the use of the RFID tags to replace more traditional antitheft tags [see Metro Group's Galeria Kaufhof Launches UHF Item-Level Pilot]. When a standard RFID tag is read at the point-of-sale counter, it can be coded to indicate that it is attached to an item that has been paid for. If a customer leaves a store with items without this coded confirmation, an alert can be triggered and appropriate action initiated. A big advantage of using RFID tags in this way is that when items are stolen from a store, the system can record exactly which items have been taken, and the inventory can be updated. Traditional antitheft tags can't do this.
Q: How many tags will Seidensticker use per year?
A: Seidensticker is expected to tag 4 million shirts in 2010, and eventually all 13 million shirts it produces under various brands each year. Seidensticker uses the AD-826 inlay, which was developed by Avery Dennison. Avery Dennison prints and encodes tags at its service offices in Hong Kong, Vietnam, India and Germany, and delivers the tags to Seidensticker factories to be attached to finished garments.
Q: What sort of new business cases and uses do you foresee for RFID, especially by retailers? Do you see any developing trends?
A: The new business cases for RFID are all about using item-level tags for a variety of purposes throughout the supply chain—from the source to the consumer. This can be summarized as a "one tag/many functions" strategy.
The Seidensticker project is an example of this, since the individual items are read at various points throughout the supply chain, and then ultimately in the retail store. Previously, people might have thought of doing this using larger RFID tags on pallets or cartons. Today, you can do it using item-level tags.
Another new use is RFID for improving the customer experience in the store. When a customer approaches an RFID-equipped mirror or screen with a tagged garment, this can trigger an automatic display of matching items, available sizes, suitable accessories or even a video of a model wearing the item. This is an area of enormous development potential, as the use of RFID tags becomes more widespread. One company active in this area is Thebigspace [see Magicmirror Could Assist Retail Customers].
A: A fast-developing application is the use of the RFID tags to replace more traditional antitheft tags [see Metro Group's Galeria Kaufhof Launches UHF Item-Level Pilot]. When a standard RFID tag is read at the point-of-sale counter, it can be coded to indicate that it is attached to an item that has been paid for. If a customer leaves a store with items without this coded confirmation, an alert can be triggered and appropriate action initiated. A big advantage of using RFID tags in this way is that when items are stolen from a store, the system can record exactly which items have been taken, and the inventory can be updated. Traditional antitheft tags can't do this.
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