Varley, a London-founded women’s activewear brand with six stores across the United States and the United Kingdom, has taken its inventory accuracy from under 70% to more than 99% after moving its stock onto RFID. The figures come from a case study published on 20 October 2026 by Datascan, the US inventory-counting and RFID services provider that carried out the implementation, and from a matching undated case study by Frequentiel, the French RFID software house founded in 2007 whose Octo+ platform runs the item data.
Each store carries roughly 5,000 items. That is a small estate by the standards of the apparel RFID projects that usually get written up, which is most of what makes this one worth reading.
Pen and paper at SKU level
Datascan describes a business still running its stock records on pen-and-paper methods as it opened stores in two countries. Staff were physically verifying what was in the building before they could answer a customer, and the inventory team had no dependable basis for replenishment or for checking what had arrived from the distribution centre.
Apparel makes that worse than it sounds. A record saying a store holds a particular product is close to useless if nobody can say which styles, sizes and colours are on the floor, and that is the detail a manual count loses first. Frequentiel’s account lists three problems: replenishment decided without a true on-hand figure, no efficient way to resolve distribution centre versus store discrepancies, and accuracy below 70%, which it links to missed sales.
Five months from signature to first live store
Varley signed with Datascan in May 2025 and its first store went live in October 2025, five months later. Datascan supplied the implementation and Frequentiel’s Octo+ the software layer, tracking each item from the moment it is tagged to the moment it is sold.
Most products are tagged at source, before they reach the stores. For exceptions, Octo+ handles the encoding and label printing on Zebra printers, the RFID printer-encoders that write data to a tag while printing the human-readable label, so a garment arriving untagged can still be brought into the system.
The operating model is the part worth copying. Rather than infrequent wall-to-wall audits, store teams run daily cycle counts at zone level, which keeps the stock record close to reality without disrupting customers. Octo+ also keeps a digital audit trail for inbound deliveries and outbound shipments, flagging discrepancies as they happen, and gives floor staff a real-time product search.
The result, and who is saying it
Both partners publish the same headline: accuracy up from under 70% to a consistent 99% or better, with automatic adjustments keeping the system aligned to physical stock. Frequentiel adds that reliable on-hand data has let Varley optimise replenishment, with an effect on conversion and other KPIs it does not quantify, and that real-time discrepancy checks have removed the usual friction between logistics and retail.
Luke Kosman, VP of Global Sales and GM, RFID Solutions at Datascan, is quoted as saying: “RFID is valuable when it gives store teams information they can trust and act on. With Datascan and Octo+, Varley moved from below 70% inventory accuracy to more than 99%. That significantly changes their day-to-day and ability to improve their customers’ experience. Store teams can see what’s actually in each store, make replenishment decisions with confidence, and manage inventory across a growing U.S. and U.K. business.”
Frequentiel says Octo+ is planned next for Varley’s distribution centres, which would close the loop from inbound goods to final sale.
What the case studies do not say
This is partner-published material, not independent verification. Datascan ran the implementation and published the page on its own site on 20 October 2026; Frequentiel sells the software and its page carries no date at all. Varley itself has said nothing publicly about RFID, with no mention of it on the brand’s website or press page, so there is no retailer-side account to check against.
Neither partner names any of the hardware. There is no tag chip, no reader, no handheld, no frequency band and no air interface standard anywhere in the public material, and the only equipment named is the Zebra printers used for exception encoding. The fuller Datascan case study sits behind a download form, so on the published pages the deployment cannot be specified.
The measurement is thin too. Neither page explains how the sub-70% baseline was arrived at or which counting method it replaced, and no count times are published for the RFID process, so there is no productivity figure to set beside the accuracy figure. Six stores is also a small sample, and a small estate is easier to get to 99% than a hundred-store chain.
None of which makes it uninteresting. The useful numbers are the two a small retailer can plan against: six shops at about 5,000 items each is enough to justify item-level tagging, and five months from signature to first live store is a timetable to hold against a vendor’s proposal.
More deployment write-ups are in our case studies archive, with more from the sector in retail and fashion.
Read more at https://datascan.com/varley-rfid-inventory-accuracy/ and https://frequentiel.com/case-studies/varley
