Interview: Lesley Suen on RFID at Scale and Identity at Source

SML connects more than 20 billion products a year for over 600 brands, which makes Lesley Suen one of the few people who can say what actually breaks at that volume rather than what breaks in a pilot. Speaking at the RAIN in Action Summit in Madrid, she holds an unusual dual role: VP of Product and Innovation, and General Manager for Greater China, so she sees both the roadmap and the factory floor it has to survive. We put six questions to her on exception management at billions of items, embedding a tag that survives the life of a garment, why Chinese and European programmes start from opposite ends, and whether a twelve-month estate-wide rollout is honest. Her answers are published in full and unedited.

You are speaking at RAIN in Action as VP of Product and Innovation and as General Manager for Greater China, which is an unusual combination. What does the product roadmap look like from a Greater China vantage point that it would not look like from Europe or the US?

Greater China gives me a slightly different perspective because I see both the product strategy and what actually happens at the point of production. In Europe and the US, the RFID conversation has historically been driven more by the retailer, inventory accuracy, omnichannel, loss prevention and increasingly Digital Product Passports. In Greater China, you are much closer to where the product is actually made, identified and serialised. So I tend to look at the roadmap starting further upstream. How do we establish the right identity at source? How do we make sure the tag, the product and the data are correctly associated? How do we validate that before the product leaves the factory?

Manufacturers are also dealing with shorter lead times, smaller production runs and much more product variation. That means capabilities such as on-demand encoding and printing, source verification and automated validation become increasingly important. I also think that upstream perspective becomes even more relevant as the industry moves towards DPP and broader product traceability. The quality of the data downstream ultimately depends on how well you establish the identity of the product at the beginning.

SML connects more than 20 billion products a year for over 600 brands. At that volume, what fails that would never show up in a pilot? I am interested in the problems that only appear at scale, because most of our readers are planning deployments and have never seen one at that size.

The biggest difference at scale is that you stop managing the normal cases and start managing the exceptions. A pilot may involve a few hundred SKUs, one environment and a relatively controlled process. At scale, you have thousands of suppliers, factories, product types and production scenarios. You start seeing duplicate identities, incorrect SKU-to-serial associations, encoding errors, substitutions on the production line, rework, cancelled orders and products moving between factories. Individually, each of those exceptions looks small. But when you are dealing with billions of items, even a very low error rate becomes a very large operational problem.

That is why I think RFID at scale is as much a data-quality and process-governance challenge as it is an RF challenge. The tag has to work, of course. But more importantly, you need confidence that the digital identity being created genuinely belongs to the physical product it is attached to. That is one of the areas we are increasingly focused on, moving beyond simply supplying a tag towards helping establish a trusted product identity at source.

“The biggest difference at scale is that you stop managing the normal cases and start managing the exceptions.”

InfuseRFID embeds a washable tag into the garment itself rather than attaching a label. What did you have to solve to make a tag survive the life of a garment, and where does it still struggle?

Embedding RFID into a garment changes the engineering problem quite significantly. With a conventional hangtag or label, you have much more control over the construction and placement. Once you integrate RFID into the garment itself, you have to consider the complete lifecycle, manufacturing processes, heat, pressure, washing, drying, chemicals, repeated mechanical stress and, importantly, how the tag interacts with different fabrics and garment constructions. You also cannot solve durability at the expense of the consumer experience. It still needs to feel like part of the garment rather than a piece of technology that has been added to it.

The challenge is therefore finding the right balance between RF performance, durability, size, softness and manufacturability. I would also not say there is one embedded solution that works universally. Different materials and product categories behave differently, so testing and application engineering remain extremely important. What is exciting is that as the technology becomes smaller and more durable, the number of products where permanent digital identity becomes practical continues to expand.

The Thursday track at RAIN in Action includes a panel called “The Tag That Stays and the Tag That Leaves Cleanly”. Those are genuinely competing requirements: circularity wants a tag that detaches for recycling, and traceability wants one that never leaves. Which way do you think the industry settles, and what does SML build for in the meantime?

I actually think both will exist. The important distinction is between the identity of the product and the physical carrier of that identity. Traceability requires the identity to persist, but it does not necessarily mean that the same physical RFID tag has to remain attached forever. For some use cases, rental, authentication, industrial laundry or certain circular business models, a permanently embedded identity makes a lot of sense. For others, particularly where recycling or material separation is important, the industry may deliberately design parts of the identifier to be removable.

That is why I do not think SML should bet on a single physical format. We support everything from hangtags and adhesive labels through care labels and embedded RFID, as well as QR and NFC carriers for Digital Product Passports. Our approach is to make the product identity persistent while giving the brand flexibility over which physical carrier stays and which one leaves. Over time, I think we will also see much more deliberate design-for-circularity in the tag itself, rather than treating sustainability and RFID performance as separate engineering questions.

You have led item-level RFID rollouts for retailers across APAC. What do European retailers consistently get wrong that Asian retailers do not, and the other way round?

I would not frame it as one region getting RFID right and another getting it wrong. The starting point is often different because the economics, supply chains and RFID ecosystems are different. In Europe and North America, RFID adoption has traditionally been driven from the store, with inventory accuracy, stock visibility, omnichannel fulfilment and labour efficiency forming a large part of the business case.

In China, there are a few additional dynamics. First, China has long been a major production hub for RFID tags and labels, so there is already a relatively mature ecosystem around the technology. As a result, some Chinese retailers and brand owners are comfortable looking at RFID across the full supply chain from the beginning, rather than viewing it purely as a store technology.

Second, the labour economics can be quite different. In some Asian markets, where labour costs are lower than in Europe or North America, the business case for replacing manual activity in a store may not be as compelling on its own. A retailer may compare the recurring cost of tagging every item with simply adding a few more people. So the value proposition often has to be broader. The discussion becomes: can RFID improve efficiency across manufacturing, distribution and retail? Can it improve shipment accuracy, traceability and inventory visibility throughout the supply chain?

For domestic premium brands in China, we also see greater emphasis on brand protection and grey-market diversion. They may want to understand not only whether an item is in stock, but where that specific item was produced, where it was intended to be sold and where it ultimately appeared.

So I think one of the differences is that some Chinese brands start with a more end-to-end view of item identity, whereas many European and North American programmes historically started with store inventory accuracy and expanded upstream later. Ultimately, though, those approaches are converging. Once a brand has a reliable unique identity for every product, the same infrastructure can support inventory, supply-chain efficiency, traceability, brand protection and increasingly consumer-facing applications.

If a retailer told you they wanted item-level RFID live across their whole estate within twelve months, what would you tell them honestly about whether that is possible?

Sure, twelve months can absolutely be possible. But I would first want to understand what twelve-month success actually means for that retailer. The answer depends on the scale of the programme: how many items they produce, how many SKUs they manage, how many suppliers and factories are involved, the complexity of their retail supply chain and the number and format of their stores.

It also depends on the objective. Does “live” simply mean that every item is RFID-tagged? Does it mean RFID is operational in every store? Or does it mean the retailer expects to be generating reliable analytics and measurable business outcomes within twelve months? Those are very different milestones.

If the objective is clear and the supply chain is relatively straightforward, twelve months is very achievable. For a more complex retailer, I would normally break the programme into stages: establish source tagging and identity first, make sure the data is accurate, integrate it into the relevant systems and then scale the operational use cases. I would say the timeline has to be defined against the retailer’s scale, complexity and, most importantly, what they expect RFID to deliver at the end of those twelve months.