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American Apparel's RFID Guru Launches RFID Software Startup
After just three weeks working as a consultant, Livingston began meeting with Lampert and Yadav, and together the three founded Truecount. Yadav is currently working in India, overseeing about a dozen software engineers who are developing Truecount's user-interface software package to automate inventory management. Lampert is based in Toronto, while Livingston is stationed in Dorset, Vt. Eventually, Livingston says, he expects the firm to be headquartered in Toronto. The trio hope that retailers will come to see Truecount as a household name they can trust for its RFID software.
According to Livingston, the design of Truecount's product—currently known simply as Truecount Retail Solutions—is based on his learnings from American Apparel, as well as his three-week consulting experience. "I took my understanding of the core elements of item-level management and added nuances," he states. For example, as an end user of RFID technology, he saw how cross-reads could create problems for a retailer. Cross-reads occur when an RFID interrogator reads tags in the general vicinity, instead of solely those that a retailer is trying to read. If a security gate were designed with RFID readers set to be highly sensitive, in order to read small tags on high-value items like jewelry, for instance, there could be cross-reads with other products not passing through a security gate, but simply located near it. "We could mess with the power of the antenna, but then you have a problem with performance."
Such cross-reading issues can be better addressed, Livingston says, by instructing the software to identify tags' distance and movement, in order to calculate when an item passes through a security portal. In that way, he explains, the software can differentiate between a tag passing through the gate and a tag within the store that is simply located near the reader.
Another challenge that the Truecount software will address is how to replace a missing RFID tag. "The tag is as important as the item it's attached to," Livingston says, since it connects to all information regarding that item—its brand, size and stock-keeping unit (SKU), for example. Simply printing a new tag and attaching it to a product works for paper price tags, but not in the case of RFID. Therefore, Truecount has included a function in its software enabling a new tag to be created, unlinking the item data from the previous tag and linking that information to the new one. At American Apparel, he says, "I saw everything that could happen, and I took that to our developers and said, 'These are the obstacles retailers face.'"
Livingston speculates that the timing is good for Truecount's product launch, as he sees a growing number of large retailers announcing their use of RFID, more product manufacturers tagging merchandise before it is shipped, and the cost of RFID hardware dropping. "I've seen tags that are priced 60 percent less than they were three years ago, when I was with American Apparel," he says. What's more, he expects to see more RFID tags built into mobile phones in the coming years, leading to other marketing options for stores that could then use the technology to read the tag in a customer's phone, thereby allowing a retailer to identify that shopper as one of its regular customers, and enabling the firm to then send appropriate price-reduction announcements or coupons via that person's phone as he or she passes a store or department.
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According to Livingston, the design of Truecount's product—currently known simply as Truecount Retail Solutions—is based on his learnings from American Apparel, as well as his three-week consulting experience. "I took my understanding of the core elements of item-level management and added nuances," he states. For example, as an end user of RFID technology, he saw how cross-reads could create problems for a retailer. Cross-reads occur when an RFID interrogator reads tags in the general vicinity, instead of solely those that a retailer is trying to read. If a security gate were designed with RFID readers set to be highly sensitive, in order to read small tags on high-value items like jewelry, for instance, there could be cross-reads with other products not passing through a security gate, but simply located near it. "We could mess with the power of the antenna, but then you have a problem with performance."
Such cross-reading issues can be better addressed, Livingston says, by instructing the software to identify tags' distance and movement, in order to calculate when an item passes through a security portal. In that way, he explains, the software can differentiate between a tag passing through the gate and a tag within the store that is simply located near the reader.
Livingston speculates that the timing is good for Truecount's product launch, as he sees a growing number of large retailers announcing their use of RFID, more product manufacturers tagging merchandise before it is shipped, and the cost of RFID hardware dropping. "I've seen tags that are priced 60 percent less than they were three years ago, when I was with American Apparel," he says. What's more, he expects to see more RFID tags built into mobile phones in the coming years, leading to other marketing options for stores that could then use the technology to read the tag in a customer's phone, thereby allowing a retailer to identify that shopper as one of its regular customers, and enabling the firm to then send appropriate price-reduction announcements or coupons via that person's phone as he or she passes a store or department.
