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Lord & Taylor Tags Shoes, Boosts Sales
Initially, Lord & Taylor met with various RFID vendors. The retailer selected Motorola for a one-day proof-of-concept test, conducted in April. Lord & Taylor had considered utilizing RFID tags on some apparel and jewelry as well, but opted to restrict its initial deployment to shoes.
On May 11, the company began piloting RFID at its flagship store on New York City's Fifth Avenue. During the pilot, associates working in the shoe department attached an EPC Gen 2 passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tag to each pair of shoes on the sales floor, and then interrogated those tags using Motorola MC3190-Z handheld readers. The system was tested for several months before Lord & Taylor began employing RFID technology at a second store in August. In September, the company began setting up the system at four additional locations.
In the future, the retailer would also like to use RFID in conjunction with planograms (a diagram indicating where retail products should be placed on shelves), in order to verify that each store's layout matches the presentation required by the product vendor, thereby ensuring that racks contain the proper product mix.
"We are leveraging the basic premise that if you know where the merchandise is, you can get more sales," Smith states. "If you are able to take inventory every night, or a subset of inventory every night, there is a pretty high payback."
The company intends to roll out the solution to all 47 of its stores within the United States, as well as at Hudson's Bay stores in Canada. Once shoe manufacturers begin applying RFID tags to their products before sending them to Lord & Taylor's DCs, Smith adds, the retailer's staff will no longer need to attach tags to the shoes they sell.
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On May 11, the company began piloting RFID at its flagship store on New York City's Fifth Avenue. During the pilot, associates working in the shoe department attached an EPC Gen 2 passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tag to each pair of shoes on the sales floor, and then interrogated those tags using Motorola MC3190-Z handheld readers. The system was tested for several months before Lord & Taylor began employing RFID technology at a second store in August. In September, the company began setting up the system at four additional locations.
In the future, the retailer would also like to use RFID in conjunction with planograms (a diagram indicating where retail products should be placed on shelves), in order to verify that each store's layout matches the presentation required by the product vendor, thereby ensuring that racks contain the proper product mix.
The company intends to roll out the solution to all 47 of its stores within the United States, as well as at Hudson's Bay stores in Canada. Once shoe manufacturers begin applying RFID tags to their products before sending them to Lord & Taylor's DCs, Smith adds, the retailer's staff will no longer need to attach tags to the shoes they sell.
