- The men’s shoe company used a retailer’s RFID mandate as catalyst to deploy an inventory management system identifying each product as it enters and leaves its warehouse
- With the RFID4U technology, Carrucci has achieved the inventory accuracy needed to enable online purchasing from its website.
When Carrucci Shoes received an RFID technology mandate from one of the retailers that sell its products last year, it had a choice: attach tags to goods headed to the retailer and simply absorb the cost of that effort, or lean into the technology for its own, internal benefits.
The shoe brand has taken the latter option, leveraging the RFID tags that it incorporates into every boxed pair of shoes it makes, to automate the receiving as well as shipping of its goods.
The data from the RFID4U solution, known as TagMatiks Wedge, not only helps ensure the right products are shipped to its customers, the retailers, but enables Carrucci to gain a high level of inventory accuracy needed for e-commerce sales. The solution is designed to be an inexpensive application that can be downloaded at no cost for up to 500 scans and comes with a “success center” for live chat and ticket-based support.
Since the RFID system went live in May, the footwear company has reduced its labor costs, increased inventory visibility for ecommerce sales, and ensured errors don’t happen when shipping goods to customers, said Janice Hu, operations director at Carrucci Shoes’ parent company King Windsor Group.
Men’s Dress and Casual Shoes Worldwide
Carrucci, founded nearly 20 years ago in Los Angeles, makes men’s dress and casual shoes that include leather boots, loafers and sneakers. Its products are sold at department stores as well as boutiques around the world.
Last year Carrucci faced a May 2024 mandate to tag all goods with an RFID label, encoded with a unique ID. For the retailer, (Walmart and Macy’s are among retailers with similar mandates), RFID tagged goods can be automatically identified as they are received and can be more easily tracked through the stores as they are stocked in backrooms, sales floors or when they are sold.
To meet retailer requirements, some companies are simply attaching the tags to the products destined for those specific (RFID requiring) stores. Carrucci has taken a different approach—deploying the technology for its own in-house inventory management as well as in the receiving area and for shipping notifications.
Solving Inventory Problems
Long before the mandate was issued, Carrucci had faced challenges related to inventory management. While the company always tried to maintain inventory accuracy, doing so was labor intensive.
In fact, an inventory count in the warehouse could take employees half of a workday to complete only one or two shoe styles. As a result, there was never a full inventory count completed in the facility.
Additionally, the company has moved toward online sales, which made inventory accuracy that much more important. In order to sell goods directly to customers, Carrucci wanted to be sure the product was available and ready to be shipped from the Los Angeles warehouse.
“We needed to be sure our inventory is always accurate—when a customer purchases a product, no matter if it’s wholesale customer or retailer—if we say the item is available we want to make sure it’s always available,” Hu said.
Seeing an Opportunity in a Mandate
So when Carrucci Shoes was tapped to meet the RFID mandate, the company reached out to RFID reader manufacturers as well as tag providers. But officials soon found that without a full RFID solution, there was no way to make sense of the EPC tag data being captured.
“The digits don’t really mean anything to us, we needed a human readable format,” said Hu. They went to RFID4U for the full solution.
Hu praises the system as low cost and easy to deploy. “As a small business we don’t need to pay high monthly subscription fees,” she said. They also needed a solution that provided data that was relevant to the existing inventory data software already in use.
With the RFID solution that resulted, “we can customize to the format we use,” she said, including the SKU numbers related to shoe style, color and size in the warehouse.
Building the Solution with RFID4U
Between January and May of this year, the company tagged its products in the warehouse, with one tag per box. They then began capturing tag reads by walking through the warehouse with a handheld reader.
The company found its workers could conduct an inventory count of goods in its warehouse in just 10 minutes with the handheld TSL reader.
Officials next began to look at other applications that might be a benefit. “We realized the RFID can do more than just inventory counts, so we started using it for inbound and outbound shipments, to verify the quantities,” stated Hu.
How it Works
Now that the system is fully live, the products are being tagged at the manufacturing site.
When Carrucci places an order from the manufacturing site, they send the corresponding Avery Dennison tags to the factory. As the new products are packed in shoe boxes, the RFID tags are applied to each one, and the unique ID encoded on that tag is linked to the product SKU.
As the products are received in Los Angeles at the Carrucci warehouse, staff use the handheld reader to receive them. That eliminates the need to open each carton and view what products are inside.
When new orders come in from stores, Carrucci staff members prepare cartons for shipping, and use the handheld reader again to create an automated record of what was shipped. If an error is occurring in the packing process, the technology can identify the error before the goods are sent to the store.
Finding the Missing Pair of Shoes
Recently, the system caught such an error, Hu said, when a specific pair of shoes couldn’t be located. By putting the RFID reader into “Find” mode, they were able to walk around the area, until the reader captured the tag ID and guided them to the shoes in question. They discovered that the pair had been inadvertently packed in the wrong carton.
“You know it’s all human work when it comes to pick and pack, so sometimes an error can occur,” Hu said.
Ultimately catching such errors means saving time for workers and preventing chargebacks from retailers. And with more accurate inventory, Carrucci can be more confident when conducting its e-commerce sales.
Reducing Cancellation Rate
“Without inventory accuracy, the ERP system may show a product being in stock, but it is not,” Hu explained. Although the company offered e-commerce sales before RFID was deployed, the order cancellation rate was high, because a pair of shoes that was made available online for purchase, wasn’t actually available in the warehouse. “At the end of the day if we don’t have it the order is cancelled,” said Hu. That means not only a loss in sale but also in customer satisfaction.
Today the company has a low cancellation rate for its ecommerce sales, and high accuracy in order fulfillments to retailers.
RFID4U sees Carrucci as a pioneer in technology use, while there is a growing interest in its capabilities, said Archit Dua, the company’s senior director of strategic accounts.
That growing interest is in-part due to the common retailer mandates that apparel and general merchandise brands are having to meet. In fact, the mandates are bringing them in touch with the technology for the first time for many companies.
“It’s still a small percentage that is actively wanting to not only just ‘slap and ship’ [RFID tags],” Dua said, but instead are taking the initiative to adopt RFID internally as an organization. “We’re seeing a big upward trend in this now.”
Moving Beyond Introductions
Over the past year there has been a rush to meet mandates with companies feeling the time pressure to simply get the tags identified and attached to goods before the mandate deadline arrived.
“But now many organizations have met the mandates, and now the next question is what can they do with the technology,” said Dua. He pointed to pressures retailers are facing more than ever: labor costs, fast paced order fulfillment, charge-backs from retailers when errors are made, and the high cost of logistics.
“Just the cost of shipping itself—having a wrong shipment is so expensive in today’s world. You not only have to reship the product to the customer but in some cases the supplier pays for the loss of the product sale,” he said.
RFID Expansion
RFID4U’s goal is to help spur the technology adoption forward, whether with small companies or Fortune 500 firms.
In the meantime, Carrucci intends to further explore what can be done with the technology, now that tags are on every product. In the future, Hu said, Carrucci may expand its use of RFID to make tag reading more automatic.
The company has begun investigating fixed RFID readers such as portals that could be installed in doorways or dock doors. “We are still conducting our research on that,” Hu said.