Nearly every fan at a live sporting or entertainment event would take personalised merchandise if it were offered quickly, and around half would pay a premium for it, but most of that demand never turns into a sale. That is the headline finding of research commissioned by Avery Dennison and published on 10 September 2026, alongside the personalisation platform and RFID stock system the company sells into stadium retail.
Avery Dennison is a US materials science and digital identification company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange as AVY and headquartered in Mentor, Ohio. It turned over around $8.9bn in 2025 and is one of the world’s largest suppliers of RFID inlays and tags, a position it consolidated when it bought Smartrac’s RFID transponder business in 2020.
The survey ran across more than 1,400 respondents in nine markets: the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Benelux, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Of those, 97% said they wanted customised merchandise at events, and 52% said they would pay more than $15 on top of the price of the item to have it personalised. Against that, 63% said they had abandoned a merchandise purchase at a live event because of a queue or an out of stock item.
Patience is the constraint the numbers keep returning to. Only 20% of respondents said they would queue for longer than 20 minutes to have merchandise personalised during an event, and on a concourse where the gap between arriving and kick-off is short, 20 minutes is not much of a grace period.
One thing to hold in mind while reading the percentages: Avery Dennison commissioned the survey, and it sells both the kiosks and the inventory system the findings point towards. The full write-up is published as a free whitepaper, “From the Stands to the Store: Unlocking Untapped Revenue in Live Event Retail”.
The RFID part is counting letters and numbers, not garments
The element of this that matters to an RFID audience is not the touchscreen. It is Clear Count, Avery Dennison’s RFID-enabled inventory system, which is built into the Custom Studio platform and handles what the trade calls component inventory.
In a personalisation operation the product does not exist until the fan orders it. What the stand actually holds is a stock of parts: individual heat transfer letters and numbers in each typeface, size and colour, plus patches, badges, woven labels and blank garments in every size. A single order for a shirt carrying a player’s name and squad number can consume a dozen of those small components. Counting them by hand means opening boxes and tallying characters, which is slow enough that stands tend to be counted rarely and over-stocked as insurance against a bad count.
Clear Count applies RFID tags to the stock packs so those components can be counted in a sweep rather than by hand. The claimed payoff runs two ways. Operators get live visibility of which letters, numbers and sizes are actually left, so a combination can come off the menu before a fan reaches the front of the queue and is told it is unavailable. And because the count is trustworthy, the stand can hold less buffer stock, cutting the volume of embellishment components bought and never used.
Avery Dennison’s own published material on Clear Count describes it only as RFID-enabled. As of September 2026 it does not state the frequency band or air interface protocol used by the stock pack tags, so no frequency is attributed here. Readers new to the distinctions between tag types and frequency bands will find them set out in our RFID glossary.
Two numbers from NFL clubs
The concrete results in the announcement come from two American football teams. At the San Francisco 49ers, Avery Dennison says self-service kiosks and streamlined printing cut production times by more than 55%. At the Dallas Cowboys, it says the Clear Count integration has saved 912 hours of labour a year.
The Cowboys figure is the more useful of the two for anyone building a business case, because it is a labour number rather than a speed number. On a standard 2,080-hour working year, 912 hours is a little under half a full-time post, recovered from stock counting and from the chasing that follows a count which turns out to be wrong.
Custom Studio and Embelex
Custom Studio itself is Avery Dennison’s connected retail customisation platform, combining self-service kiosks, QR code and e-commerce ordering routes, heat press bonders, a projector system for placing transfers accurately, and the inventory software. Behind it sits Embelex, the on-product branding and embellishment platform Avery Dennison launched in April 2022, covering heat transfers, embroidered patches, woven labels and specialty graphics. That portfolio is what widens personalisation beyond names and numbers, and the company says it now extends to engraving on balls and hockey pucks.
“Every minute in line cools the emotional pull that drives impulse purchases in the first place,” said Sergio Shmilovitch, vice president and general manager of Embelex at Avery Dennison. “Poor inventory management magnifies the situation, as too often a fan reaches the front of a line only to find their size or player name unavailable. The result is an abandoned sale and a disappointing experience. Custom Studio was designed to eliminate this friction.”
“Speed and availability decide whether that sale actually happens,” Shmilovitch said. “Custom Studio puts co-creation in the fan’s hands and real-time inventory control in the operator’s. It means clubs, brands and retailers stop losing sales they should be winning.”
More on RFID in team stores and stadium retail is collected in our Sports and Retail sections.
