It has been reported that Sainsbury’s is rolling out RFID technology across the Tu clothing departments in 400 of its stores, with full implementation across the Tu estate expected by early next month. The story was published as an exclusive by Drapers.
According to that reporting, the rollout follows a pilot earlier this year that the supermarket judged a success. Drapers says the trial gave Tu better visibility of stock levels, sped up replenishment and let the team manage stock more efficiently, the three benefits apparel retailers most often cite when they move to item-level tagging.
Ben Smith, Sainsbury’s clothing managing director, told Drapers: “We’ve introduced RFID this summer.”
He added: “We are going through a rollout now which allows us to maintain all of that product and spot any gaps that we [Tu] can replenish quickly.”
That last point is the operational heart of it. Gap detection on the shop floor is one of the clearest wins in retail RFID, and it is the reason so many fashion chains adopted the technology before their grocery counterparts did.
Catching up with the fashion pack
Drapers notes that the move brings Sainsbury’s into line with high street fashion rivals that already run RFID across their stores, among them Inditex’s Zara, Uniqlo and H&M. Tu sits in an unusual position, a sizeable clothing business operating inside a grocery estate, so the rollout is being layered onto shop floors that were not originally designed around apparel stock control.
The report also places the rollout against Sainsbury’s most recent trading update, covering the 16 weeks to 20 June, in which the retailer highlighted improvements in “availability and style” despite sales dipping 2.1% year on year.
General industry context
For readers less familiar with the technology, and by way of general background rather than anything confirmed about this particular deployment, apparel RFID almost always means UHF RAIN RFID tags applied at item level, usually at source in the supply chain. Staff then cycle count the sales floor and stockroom with handheld readers, often reading thousands of items in a few minutes, which typically lifts stock accuracy from the 60% to 70% range seen with barcode-only counting into the 90s. Once the stock file is that accurate, a system can reliably tell the difference between an item that has genuinely sold out and one sitting unfound in the back, which is exactly the gap spotting Ben Smith describes.
None of the specifics of the Sainsbury’s implementation have been made public. There is no confirmed detail on tag or reader suppliers, on whether the deployment uses handheld reading alone or adds fixed infrastructure, on where in the supply chain tags are applied, or on the commercial case behind it. We are not going to guess at any of that.
We are following up our contacts within Sainsbury’s to find more and will bring you the full case study if and when we can.
