- With UHF RFID order growth at about 29 percent, the Alabama-based technology company is boosting its inventory to more quickly serve orders in North America
- Tageos tags offer an affordable option for many of the partners and customers that atlasRFIDstore serves
Meeting demand growth in UHF RAIN RFID deployments in North America, atlasRFIDstore recently announced that it is boosting its stock of Tageos tags onsite by an initial 10 million, enabling the company to meet the large volume orders for forecasted deadlines as well as to handle the short-turnaround orders from companies such as retail suppliers, converters and solution providers.
Since 2021, Atlas has seen its tag and inlay sales volume increase by 28 percent. Hardware sales volume has increase by 29 percent, including 93 percent and 104 percent growth in printers and mobile computers. Additionally, its service bureau and encoding services have expanded by more than 100 percent.
As they project numbers ahead, “we’re expecting to see 20 to 30 percent growth this year to the overall business,” said Rod Black, head of marketing at atlasRFIDstore.
Meeting Short-turn Arounds from Smaller Companies
Growth comes from not only large brands and retailers, but some of their mid-sized counterparts and technology partners serving them that are ordering RFID products with a potentially short turn-around time.
“This program [for Tageos tag stocking] will enable us to serve more customers that need RFID tags right away,” said Steven Wood, atlasRFIDstore’s sales director.
Large orders and customers often provide a purchasing schedule that enables long range planning to prevent any delays. Not all companies can afford to do that, however. “Our customers don’t always give us the luxury of giving us an 8- or 12-day notice, and they’re just going to need to place an order. So that’s what this program is designed to do—to serve those customers that that need tags right away,” Wood said.
RFID Expands Beyond Retail Apparel
Tag purchasing is not aimed at only apparel anymore, but other home goods. General retail is growing most prevalently obviously driven by RFID mandates from companies like Walmart, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Lowe’s and Nordstrom.
There have been more orders for tags that can serve other sectors as well, however, such as the automotive market, hospitality, logistics, life sciences, industrial automation and the government for asset tracking. To serve the wide variety of options, atlasRFIDstore wants to be able to quickly respond with the right product. The goal is not only to have top performing tags, but also affordable ones for each application—Tageos’ offers affordable tags for many use cases, said Wood.
“We’re going to offer great tags that have really great prices” so affordability is still critical for many of the company’s customers, he said.
The company strives to make a recommendation for a customer based on their application requirements. “We’re always going to recommend something that is a good fit for our client’s application, because we want people to be successful with RAIN RFID. We try to remain as vendor neutral as possible,” said Wood.
Service Bureau Support
Additionally, atlasRFIDstore operates its e-commerce store with a goal to process and ship orders quickly.
“We want to be able to help someone with 25,000 units or even 2500 units right up to someone that needs 2.5 million or more—that’s the structure of this program,” said Wood.
The company also is providing service bureau encoding for companies that need their tags encoded and printed. “And we can accommodate really small orders up to really big orders,” Wood said. “Having the RFID tags on hand that we can just pull from the warehouse to put on our equipment to print and encode is going to allow us to turn that process around a lot faster.”
From atlasRFIDstore’s vantage point, RFID technology deployment is continuing to grow while smaller brands and retailers are striving to catch up with the technology. In some cases, these firms are learning just how the technology works, and how it can help identify and track their goods.
Expansion of RFID Applications with Smartphones
Wood speculated that the efforts by chip manufacturers and handset companies to build RFID reading devices into phones may have another accelerating effect for the technology as the development continues this year.
By having a UHF RAIN RFID reader in a consumer device, he said, users can walk into a store and use their phone to interrogate a product’s tag to learn more about it.
Company officials picture shoppers bringing their phone within range of the tag and access digital content about something like a bottle of wine, including where and how it was made, under what conditions, and its journey to the store.
More Inventory Expansion Ahead
While atlasRFIDstore is starting 2025 with 10 million more tags from Tageos, “from a volume perspective that’s just a part of where we’re going. We will do significantly more volume than that in terms of stocking over the course of the year,” said Wood.
The company offers a software product called Avancir which is intended to be highly configurable as asset or inventory tracking, or for tracking work in process. The software is designed in a way that allows atlasRFIDstore to provide what it calls a white gloved approach to helping customers be successful with RFID.
When requested, atlasRFIDstore employees will travel to a customer’s site to conduct site surveys, process analyses, technology feasibility testing and hardware qualification. They can provide system installation and support with its Atlas Professional Services offering or can test RFID components in their own warehouse and provide customers with recommendations based on our testing.
“We also offer remote support options so that when a customer buys a product from us they can feel confident that we’re going to be able to support them with that product and to help them get up and running,” said Wood.