- Following a 30-day rollout across 40 stores, Allbirds has expanded its RFID deployment to four more stores in the UK this summer
- The solution from Sensormatic Solutions is enabling the retailer to offer omnichannel sales from its stores due to an approximately 98 percent inventory accuracy.
Global footwear brand Allbirds—in collaboration with Sensormatic Solutions—has completed an RFID technology rollout at its four UK-based stores, after installing the technology across 40 U.S. stores in 30 days last year.
The company reported it is now offering omnichannel shipping from its stores, leveraging inventory accuracy that rose from about 60 percent, traditionally, to up-to 98 percent today.
The technology benefits are multi-fold said officials at the retailer; not only has it enabled shipment of goods from stores, but it has improved shopping experience for those in the store, and offered a better experience for store associates, while reducing need for excess inventory in the back room.
Years of Planning Behind the Fast Rollout
Allbirds is a global lifestyle brand with customers in over 40 countries. It first began investigating RFID deployment technology four years ago around the time Micah Nelson, Allbirds’ product management director, came into his position at the retail company.
Before deploying the RFID solution, Allbirds still conducted tasks such as asset management the old-fashioned way – through physical audits. As a result, “there was about 60 percent inventory accuracy,” Nelson said, and a strong incentive to boost that accuracy with technology.
“We knew we were losing money through missed sales, we knew we had too much inventory, we knew we weren’t getting the right product in stores,” he recalled. The company opted to leapfrog its inventory management system into something cutting edge.
“Rather than try to do incremental improvements we had an opportunity to kind of step out and find what’s best in class.”
Following investigation of technology companies they selected Sensormatic, “so when we brought Sensormatic [on-board] we had a road map of how we’re going to go about this.”
The company conducted a two-week pilot and began planning the roll-out, recalled Jamie Kress, RFID sales leader, North America, at Sensormatic Solutions.
Tagging Millions of Products
The rollout took place from July 16 until August 13, 2023, when all stores were fully live.
“We had some bottled-up energy ready to go with our idea and then once we met the Sensormatic Solutions team, we hit the ground running,” said Nelson.
Each pair of shoes gains one unique identifier in the form of a UHF RFID Avery Dennison tag applied under a removable insole. By applying the tag to the shoe rather than the box of each pair, the company can ensure the boxes remain recyclable, “so having it in the footwear itself helps us reduce waste,” Nelson said.
Initially the company would tag thousands of products as part of its weekly store replenishments. This was accomplished with RFID tag printers in the company’s warehouse. Today, tags are being applied to nearly all its products at the factory.
How it Works
Although tags are applied at the point of manufacture, the first tag read takes place at the stores. Traditionally sales associates had to open boxes and manually count shoes as they arrived, now they simply wave their Zebra RFID wand reader over the stacked boxes that have been delivered.
They can then use RFID to conduct regular inventory counts in the store front and back room. This said Nelson “was a ‘surprise and delight’ moment [for associates] where their job would get drastically easier.”
If a discrepancy is discovered in inventory or sales data, a store can conduct a full store cycle count with RFID in about 15 minutes and try to reverse engineer what created the problem. In some cases, stores are cycle counting their sites three times a week, just to ensure inventory accuracy.
Confidence in Inventory Counts
By bringing the accuracy of stock counts up to 98 percent, the stores have gained confidence in their inventory data even over information that may be coming from point of sale and its ERP-software based stock counts.
That confidence then led to omnichannel sales beginning this spring. Allbirds conducted a four-store pilot last year and then from March to July of this year the company has been rolling out the omnichannel service across all stores.
“We did not do ship-from-store before RFID was deployed, we wouldn’t dare,” Nelson said.
Ideal Environment for RFID
From Sensormatic Solution’s perspective, Allbirds has brought RFID technology into an environment that is well-suited for the wireless transmission, said Kress.
“Their stores are the perfect scenario for RFID: they don’t have a lot of super-densely packed merchandise in the backroom or in the sales floor,” he said. In fact, footwear in boxes, that are stacked on shelves, are uniquely readable by RFID interrogator.
“You don’t have to deal with a lot of those challenges that you see in environments with lots of metal and densely packed products,” Kress said.
And the business style of selling closed loop products, means that the benefits of RFID contrast with the way the technology is used in a more complex setting such as a department store or a general merchandise shop.
In fact, the benefit of RFID “trickles down through all” of Allbirds processes,” Kress said. For instance, it offers analytics to “understand what’s selling well, why is it selling well.” With transparency into inventory, if a particular shoe wasn’t selling well, management could know if the problem was due to how it fit, a size problem, style, or the fact that it wasn’t available in stores.
Looking Ahead
Looking forward, Nelson envisions a three-year plan that could include RFID deployment for other applications, such as point of sale or loss prevention with RFID readers at exits.
What intrigues him even more is a roadmap to use RFID to track materials that are used in products, to help build a full history of each shoe or garment.
“This isn’t just about retail, to me this to me is around recommerce and reselling product, even recycling product,” Nelson said. “How cool would it be to recycle a product [and identify the materials in it]. Or even provide information to shoppers and buyers about the materials that might have come from regenerative farming, or to trace the product’s material back to a farm or sheep to help tell the story of the product’s carbon footprint.”
There is more innovation and deployment ahead for RFID, Kress agreed.
“There are numerous DC RFID use cases to discuss and deploy,” he commented, with considerable room for growth.