Sensormatic Solutions is offering global fashion retailers two tagging alternatives which can be sewn directly into the garment without compromising its look and feel.
The Swiss retail solutions company, which is part of the Johnson Controls conglomerate, said in a statement on Tuesday that it is offering new discreet radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagging alternatives called the RFID Seam Tag and the RFID Brand Label.
Both products are designed to be discreet. The RFID Seam Tag’s narrow and flexible design allows it to be embedded in the seam of apparel and accessories. The RFID Brand Label is sewn-into the garment. As such, the Adidas, Carhartt and Macy’s supplier said retailers can protect merchandise without damaging or compromising it while also reducing the labor needed to execute enterprise-wide tagging.
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This approach, the company said, could extend the life of RFID investments and help retailers verify authenticity and deter theft. With this, they want retailers to see RFID tagging as part of the product, as opposed to an additional security measure.
“They’re designed to be permanent and tamper-resistant, providing retailers with information needed to address total retail loss from the source through their supply chains and sales floors, and beyond,” Tony D’Onofrio, president of Sensormatic Solutions, said in a statement.
Both new offerings were deliberately designed to ensure they could not be easily removed without damaging the merchandise. This way, fashion brands can verify authenticity and protect themselves against counterfeiting, grey-market sales and return fraud at scale.
These RFID tagging solutions are compatible with retailers’ existing RFID ecosystems, the company said.
This comes as the retail industry evaluates how it is approaching inventory loss, commonly known as “shrink.” Often confused for being just about theft, shrink can also be due to administrative mistakes or improper storage, essentially anything that can involve the loss of inventory between the point of manufacture and the point of sale.
It is difficult to gauge the cost of shrink in the retail industry. Even the National Retail Federation in the U.S., which for over three decades had released an annual industry report on shrink losses, stopped counting in 2023 as it noted the “average annual inventory shrink percentage was no longer an accurate benchmark.”
But if shrink is challenging to determine at an industry scale, it may be easier quantify at the brand level. Sensormatic Solutions, which specializes in shrink visibility by using data to show brands which products have gone missing and when, said adding their tags and labels at the source could help retailers better contextualize inventory loss. For example, both new RFID products have item-level data encoded in their electronic product code, which feeds into the Shrink Analyzer, the company’s cloud-based application which can analyze inventory loss by time and location down to the item level.
