The benefits of RFID item-level tagging are now common knowledge in the apparel industry, primarily for quick and accurate inventory taking, replacing what could take a whole team a day or two manually counting products while stores are closed, by a seamless process where a few employees take inventory during open hours with minimum disruption to store operations.
This order of magnitude improvement allows retailers to more actively manage their inventory often and accurately, reduce shrinkage, avoid out-of-stocks, reliably fulfill online orders from store inventory and delight their customers.
Building on this foundation, integrators and software companies were quick to propose new use cases to leverage the RFID labels on garments and footwear alike. RFID-assisted checkout by an associate, or even consumer self-checkout, accelerates the process and reduces consumer wait time. Anti-theft with RFID can determine in real-time not only that an unpaid item is leaving the store, but also which item it is.
Retailers also experiment with use cases in the fitting room, keeping track of garments a customer is trying on and offering recommendations for alternative or matching products. Analysis of fitting room data, such as which products customers try on and purchase—or not—allows retailers and their brands to identify products with a problematic fit or where price points may need to be adjusted. A common thread through most of these use cases is to make store operations more efficient and less costly, freeing up employees for valuable customer facing time.
Current Uses
Most tags currently used on apparel and footwear are either hangtags on the garments or stickers on packaging, quickly removed from purchased products and thrown away. Even when integrated into a care label or another fabric tag, RFID tags are meant to be cut-off and discarded.
This is a missed opportunity to extract several additional benefits from the technology; for example, for processing product returns— especially for returns of online orders where hangtags or packaging are often lost, discarded, or mismatched with the items. Instead, tags permanently integrated into garments would streamline product returns with immediate verification of the items’ exact SKU, provenance and purchase price, allowing for quick and accurate restocking.
At the same time, the retailer can rely on the RFID tag to provide a strong confirmation of the product’s authenticity and verify that no other return fraud is attempted.
What is Needed in a DPP Future
Even when products are not returned to the retailer, RFID tags that remain affixed to the garments have much to offer. While today’s Digital Product Passport mostly utilizes QR codes, which can provide all passport data needed to trace individual products, retrieve contents or sustainability information, and implement a circular economy, scanning the codes at scale remains a long, labor-intensive process.
Someone is needed to look for the QR code on each garment and scan it individually – a similar process to the barcode-based inventory taking that plagues retailers who haven’t yet adopted RFID. It is only with passport data encoded in RAIN RFID tags that recycling systems will be able to leverage DPP in a scalable way, sorting items at high speed to automatically send them into the appropriate recycling stream.
However, to be useful at the recycling stage, RFID tags don’t just need to be permanently embedded into the garments: they also need to be durable and withstand the same amount of abuse that clothing sometimes must endure—including going through the wash unscathed —while keeping their functionality and performance.
Washable Threshold
Besides their after-sale applications, RFID tags integrated into apparel also bring benefits at the front end of the garment’s life cycle, during product manufacturing and along the supply chain. For example, garments that are being dyed or washed together across different sizes can be easily sorted again if they were pre-tagged with RFID.
Before garments are ready for final sewing, trimming, folding and/or packaging, embedded RFID tags can help sort and track the unfinished garments as they are routed through a production facility. The same tags can be used for supply chain management as finished garments make their way from production to warehouses and retail outlets.
To realize these multiple benefits, both before and after their short stay on the retail floor, RFID tags need to be more robust than they are now. In particular, these tags need to be washable. A typical benchmark for apparel is to last through 50 consumer wash and dry cycles, and sometimes more.
However, while standard fabric RFID tags can sometimes survive a couple of washes, they cannot withstand repeated wash cycles: they are not sufficiently waterproof and cannot resist the pressure and stresses they are repeatedly exposed to in washers and dryers.
2025 Expectations
It is a similar situation during garment production, just more stringent. There, washing is less repetitive, but manufacturers use larger industrial washers and dryers that hold more garments, submitting tags to higher pressures and temperatures. The wash solutions are also harsher, using various sorts of dyes as well as chemicals or other processes to give garments a faded or worn look.
Industrial RFID laundry tags of the type that is used for the hospitality and healthcare markets (laundering bedding or linen for hotels, restaurants, hospitals, etc.) are a lot more robust than standard tags but also cost a lot more, are typically not printable with variable data and are ill-suited for standards-based EPC encoding such as the process developed by GS1 (www.gs1.org/epcglobal): they are not a solution.
Whether it is during garment manufacturing, through the supply chain, after sales for efficient returns or eventually to enable a scalable circular economy, what the industry needs are RAIN RFID labels that meet the requirements of retailers for inventory taking – high performance / high quality / low cost – while offering a higher level of robustness and waterproofing.
We expect to see this new category of tags brought to market in 2025, opening the door for new applications of RAIN and NFC RFID technologies alike.