One hanger, one garment, one identifier

In conventional garment assembly, cut panels and part-finished garments move between sewing workstations by hand, usually in bundles. That adds handling which does nothing for the garment, leaves operators waiting, and makes it hard to say where an order has got to. On the upgraded line, garment components travel on dedicated hangers carried between workstations by an automated overhead transport system, and each garment is assigned a unique RFID identifier so its production status can be read as it moves through the workshop.

The underlying idea is the unit production system, or UPS, which has been in apparel plants for decades: one carrier holds all the parts of a single garment and keeps them together through assembly. Eton Systems, the Swedish firm that grew out of shirt maker Eton Fashion and has built overhead UPS lines since 1967, uses individually addressable workstations and a per-carrier identification code for the same purpose, and claims more than 5,000 installations. Reading those carriers electronically is not new either: patents for fixed readers alongside a hanger conveyor, reading tags as garments pass, date back to the 1990s.

What the MES does with the reads

The reads feed Easemotion’s manufacturing execution system. An MES is the factory-floor layer of a plant’s software, sitting between the business systems that plan an order and the equipment that does the work; in the ISA-95 model it is Level 3, above process control and below enterprise planning. Easemotion’s MES records processing times, completed quantities and rework data per workstation, and managers work from a central dashboard to spot bottlenecks and move work around. That matters in custom activewear, where one collection can run several styles, fabric variations, sizes and specifications at once.

Alongside the 30% cut in work in process, Easemotion reports average order production cycles down 25%, a 99% on-time delivery rate, and bottleneck response times falling from roughly 30 minutes to a few minutes. The firm holds ISO 9001:2015 certification and presents the workstation-level records as a complement to its existing quality procedures rather than a replacement.

There is little to measure these numbers against

Those figures should be read as one manufacturer’s account, because no credible industry benchmark exists to hold them against. Published results here are almost all self-reported. Eton Systems quotes efficiency gains of between 30% and 100% from its own installations. A project run by India’s NIFT with Avaana, which tagged bundles rather than hangers, reported bottlenecks identified within seconds. Academic work at least confirms the problem is real: a study drawing on 42 production lines across 14 garment factories found high work in process, and swings in it, to be common. No audited cross-industry figure appears to exist for how much RFID on a garment conveyor typically cuts work in process, so 30% can be stated but not called good or bad.

Not the apparel RFID most people know

Most RFID in clothing is item-level tagging for retail, where a tag goes on the garment near the factory and is read in the shop to keep stock records straight. That use case does have numbers behind it: River Island’s inventory accuracy went from 72% to 97% after it tagged most of its products, against roughly 65% to 70% typical for untagged stock. In-factory work in process tracking is a different job: the tag identifies a garment or its carrier inside one building, the population is units in flight rather than a chain’s whole stock, and the question is where the flow is jammed today. Our Garment Tags coverage follows the retail side, and the RFID glossary explains the terms.

What the announcement leaves out

A fair amount. Easemotion names no frequency band or air interface protocol, so there is no telling whether the installation is HF or UHF; apparel conveyor systems use both, and assuming UHF from the retail precedent would be a guess. It does not identify the tag or reader supplier, the conveyor manufacturer or the MES vendor, nor whether the MES is bought in or built in house. There is no tag count, workstation count, reader count, cost or payback figure. Easemotion, legally Guangdong Easemotion Lifestyle Apparel Technology Co., Ltd, was founded in 2015 and does OEM and ODM work for international brands from a 10,000 square metre facility in Dongguan.

Read more at https://www.easemotion.com/n1922732/Easemotion-Completes-Smart-Overhead-Conveyor-Upgrade-to-Improve-Activewear-Production-Visibility.htm

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

That sentence is the only mention of RFID anywhere in the document. There is no store count, no stock accuracy figure, no named technology partner and no executive comment on it. Sainsbury’s is one of the UK’s largest grocers, and Tu is its own-brand clothing line, sold inside its supermarkets rather than through standalone shops.

What was actually deployed

The detail the results statement leaves out was reported two months earlier. Retail Technology Innovation Hub, in a piece by Scott Thompson on 31 August 2026, said Sainsbury’s was rolling RFID out across Tu clothing departments in approximately 400 stores, with the project set for completion by early September 2026. It followed a pilot earlier in 2026 which, the retailer said, improved stock level visibility, sped up replenishment and let it manage stock more efficiently.

Gillian Ekin, Head of Transformation and Operational Development at Sainsbury’s, said of the deployment: “Really proud of my team and the role they’ve played in deploying this project across our stores. A huge amount of work, collaboration and energy behind the scenes to bring this to life.”

Item-level tagging in apparel retail means a tag applied to every individual garment, usually inside the price ticket or care label. Because the tags are read in bulk and do not need line of sight, a member of staff walking a department with a handheld reader can cycle count the whole floor in minutes rather than the hours a barcode count takes. Counting that often is what keeps the stock file matching the shop floor, and that is what drives the availability and replenishment gains retailers report. Our RFID glossary covers cycle counting and item-level tagging in more detail.

No supplier and no air interface disclosed

Sainsbury’s has never said publicly who supplied the tags, readers or software behind the Tu deployment. RTIH said it had asked the retailer for specifics of the implementation, including the suppliers involved, and would update its article on a response. Nothing has been published since. Sainsbury’s has also not stated the air-interface standard or operating frequency the system uses, so none is given here. Both are unusual gaps for a UK apparel programme of this size.

One line for RFID, hard numbers for everything else

The contrast inside the results statement is what makes the disclosure interesting. Elsewhere, under a heading about real-time data and store execution, Sainsbury’s gives hard figures for other store technology: self-checkout video analytics now running in nearly 600 stores, facial recognition technology being rolled out after a trial in which logged incidents fell by 46 per cent and more than 90 per cent of identified offenders did not return, more than 100 automated mobile robots live at its Northampton warehouse, and an optimised price reduction algorithm it credits with a double digit million pound saving.

RFID is not in that section. It sits under “Resilient Tu Clothing performance and continued General Merchandise optimisation”, alongside the trading lines, which places it as a stock accuracy and availability tool rather than a loss prevention one.

Those trading lines are worth reading carefully, because Sainsbury’s does not connect them to RFID and nor should anyone else. Tu sales fell two per cent in the half on what the retailer calls tough comparatives and a subdued clothing market, though it says it outperformed that market on style perceptions, improved availability and its best ever back-to-school performance, with those sales up eight per cent. No part of that performance is attributed to RFID anywhere in the statement.

Across the group, retail sales excluding fuel reached GBP 14 billion, up 2.6 per cent, while general merchandise and clothing sales fell 3.4 per cent to GBP 800 million. Continuing underlying operating profit rose 3.6 per cent to GBP 525 million. The context for Tu matters: Argos has been agreed for sale to Swift Partners, with completion expected by the end of February 2027, and is now a discontinued operation. That leaves Tu as the main non-food business Sainsbury’s keeps, and the RFID estate it has just finished installing as the stock control layer underneath it. More UK deployments are tracked in our retail coverage.

Read more at https://corporate.sainsburys.co.uk/media/tyflutvm/j-sainsbury-plc-interim-results-2627-statement.pdf

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Lager 157 was founded in 1999 by Stefan Palm in Gällstad, a village in western Sweden, and sells low-priced own-brand basics across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, with its first German store opening in Bremen in late 2024. It has grown on product, price and word of mouth rather than advertising, which puts a lot of weight on something very plain: the right size, colour and style being on the shelf when a customer reaches for it.

Why counting a few times a year stops working

Manual stock counts were not keeping up with the pace the business was setting. The pattern will be familiar to anyone running a growing estate of stores. Counts happen a few times a year, the figure is already out of date by the time it is reconciled, and every decision taken in between rests on a number nobody quite trusts.

Three stores, three countries

Between August and October 2025, Lager 157 and ClarityRFID ran Clarity Store, the vendor’s store operations platform, in Naestved in Denmark, Nacka in Sweden and Raisio in Finland. Manual counts were replaced with real-time item-level visibility, and all three stores kept trading normally throughout.

Three markets was a deliberate choice. A single-store pilot proves the software works. Three stores in three countries proves it works against different stock profiles, different store teams and different local processes, which is the question a wider rollout actually turns on.

“The pilot gave us a completely different level of visibility into our stock, down to the individual item. That is exactly the insight we want as we plan our next stores.” Gunnar Palm, Head of Controlling and Business Development, Lager 157.

What the numbers came out at

Stock accuracy reached 98 to 99.8% across the participating stores, and SKU accuracy reached 97%. The two figures are not the same measure: one is how closely the units on hand match the units recorded, the other is how many product lines match exactly, which is the harder test in a business built on sizes and colourways.

Counting also stopped being an event and became a routine, and that is the part that changes behaviour in a store. Once a team can trust the count, replenishment stops being a judgement call, and the conversation moves from what is on the shelf to what should be.

“Lager 157 has built a fast-growing business on getting the basics right for its customers. The pilot showed what item-level inventory visibility can do for a business like theirs.” Michael Quimby, GM, ClarityRFID.

What the pilot sets up

The useful output is a measured baseline rather than a projection, and that is what carries into a wider rollout. The pattern established across the three markets becomes the template for the next set of stores, instead of a one-off exercise that has to be argued from scratch each time a new country is added.

ClarityRFID sells two products: Clarity Supply Chain, which covers RFID auditing in factories and distribution centres, including carton auditing, pack verification, supplier compliance and pallet receiving, and Clarity Store, which covers counting, replenishment, BOPIS and fulfilment, loss prevention, markdowns and store transfers for store teams. The company states 9,000 or more stores across 70 or more countries, says it is hardware agnostic across the major reader manufacturers, and was named a Leader and Top Implementer in ABI Research’s 2025 platform ranking published in the fourth quarter of 2025, placing second of fourteen platforms. SOC 1, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits are described as under way.

More deployments like this one are collected in our case studies and retail sections.

Read more at https://www.clarityrfid.com/lager-157-poc

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The published feature list mixes visual merchandising with in-store technology: an enhanced exterior, a new “river-runway” installation showing runway-inspired looks and current trends, an expanded denim department carrying more silhouettes and washes, larger and modernised fitting rooms, and a revised layout. Two items on that list matter to anyone following retail RFID. The first is “weight-sensing self-service checkouts using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology”. The second is what River Island calls “WW Smart Fitting Rooms”, which let a customer request an alternative size or another product without leaving the cubicle.

Mel Aucott, Retail Director at River Island, said the opening “represents an important step change in River Island’s bricks-and-mortar presence”. Kevin Duffy, Centre Director at centre:mk, said the store “brings something fresh to the destination’s existing quality line up of fashion retailers”.

A concept store, not a first deployment

The launch coverage reads as though RFID has just arrived at River Island. It has not. The retailer has been running item-level UHF RFID across its entire chain since 2017. In November 2016 RFID Journal reported a planned deployment across 280 stores in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium, built on Nedap’s iD Cloud. Nedap is a Dutch technology company whose retail division sells item-level stock management; iD Cloud is its cloud-hosted EPC UHF platform, the passive air interface, also marketed as RAIN RFID, that reads hundreds of garment tags a second at a few metres. Store teams read stock with !D Hand 2 handheld readers paired over Bluetooth to Android devices running the iD Cloud app. Nedap tells us the !D Hand 2 has since left its portfolio and that River Island has since moved to Zebra’s RFD40 handheld.

The tag silicon was specified at the time too. The pilot used Alien Technology Higgs 4 inlays supplied by Byways Group, and the full rollout moved to Impinj Monza R6-P. Alien Technology and Impinj are the two long-established American chip suppliers for passive UHF garment tags. Jon Wright, Head of Global Loss Prevention and Safety at River Island, and Danny Haak, then iD Cloud Product Manager at Nedap Retail, ran a three-month, three-store pilot that returned 97 per cent inventory accuracy, sales above expectation and all three of its KPIs met, with installation following mainly from May to October 2017.

Self-checkout came later and from a different supplier. Keonn, a Barcelona-based RFID hardware manufacturer, published a River Island case study covering its AdvanGo RFID self-checkout and AdvanPay RFID point-of-sale readers: a two-store pilot, then six stores live, then a further 24 scheduled for 2024, with the UK tag specialist Tag Company managing and integrating the solution. Keonn’s stated outcomes were shorter queues, a better shopping experience and greater visibility of a product’s life in store.

River Island has also put numbers on the record itself. Speaking at Retail Technology Show in London on 24 to 25 April 2024, Chief Information Officer Simon Pakenham-Walsh, who joined from Sweaty Betty, said the RFID rollout was complete company-wide, that stock accuracy had improved from roughly 70 per cent to 98 per cent, and that self-checkout had reached 60 per cent adoption across the store network. He also described fitting room screens then in trial, showing a customer what they had tried on and letting them talk to a store associate, which had cut returns by 40 per cent and made customers 50 per cent more likely to buy when they requested extra sizes or products through an associate. He said River Island planned to extend RFID into garment care labels.

The weight-sensing claim deserves a closer look

Set against seven years of existing deployment, the one technically novel line in the centre:mk announcement is weight sensing on an RFID self-checkout, and it is an odd pairing. An RFID self-checkout reads every EPC in the basket or on the pedestal, so the till already knows exactly which items are present without anyone scanning a barcode. Weight verification is what supermarket self-checkouts use precisely because they cannot see what is in the bag: the scale confirms that what was scanned matches what was put down. In fashion, RFID is normally sold as the thing that removes the need for that check.

So either River Island has deliberately added a weight layer on top of the tag read as a shrink control, catching untagged, detagged or mis-tagged items the reader cannot see, which would be a notable piece of loss prevention engineering, or the two capabilities have been conflated somewhere in the press material. No source resolves it. The announcement names no supplier for the checkouts, and while Keonn hardware is in the chain elsewhere, nothing confirms it is the hardware at centre:mk or that weight sensing is part of it. Keonn’s own case study makes no mention of weight sensing at all.

WW Smart Fitting Rooms, with no vendor attached

“WW Smart Fitting Rooms” is the name River Island’s own announcement uses, and it has been repeated across the trade press. No vendor is identified, and “WW” does not map to any RFID or fitting room supplier, which suggests a garble somewhere in the supplied copy. For context, Nedap’s published River Island case study describes iD Cloud integrated with fitting room technology from Crave Retail, an American supplier of connected fitting room software, so that is the integration Nedap documents for the chain. It is not confirmed as the system installed at centre:mk, and it should not be read as an expansion of “WW”.

The vendor silence runs through the whole announcement. Every named supplier in this story, Nedap, Keonn, Tag Company, Crave Retail, Impinj and Alien Technology, comes from older case studies and press coverage about the chainwide estate. None of them appears in the centre:mk launch material.

What the underlying estate has delivered

Nedap’s River Island case study puts hard figures on the installed base, though it names no store count, no reader model and no River Island staff. It reports inventory accuracy above 98 per cent from weekly RFID cycle counts, on-shelf availability raised to over 99 per cent through real-time refill, and a stock reduction of 30 to 40 per cent while holding that availability. On the shop floor, 61 per cent of customers who tried a product on went on to buy it, and 84 per cent of customer assistance requests were handled by store teams within two minutes. Nedap also credits the system with removing the need for additional security measures, which allows hard tags to be dropped in selected stores in support of a seamless self-checkout experience, cutting labour cost and turning stock takes from hours into minutes.

Why a technology-led concept store in 2026

The commercial backdrop explains the timing. River Island announced a restructuring plan in August 2025 that closed 33 UK stores and renegotiated rents at 71 sites. For 2025 it reported a pre-tax profit of £11.6m, against an operating loss of £65.3m in 2024, with gross profit of £94.3m, up from £37m. Ben Lewis returned as Chief Executive and in June 2026 set out plans for new stores across the UK and Ireland alongside digital investment. A 12,800 sq ft concept store built around checkout and fitting room technology is what that plan looks like on the ground.

The thing to watch, as the concept moves into other stores, is whether the weight-sensing layer travels with it and which supplier is behind it. If it does, a chain that has run RFID since 2017 will have decided that reading the tag is no longer sufficient verification at the till, and that is a question for every fashion retailer with an RFID self-checkout programme. More on item-level deployments in retail.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The RAIN Alliance is the global industry association for RAIN RFID, the battery-free UHF RFID technology that works in the 860 MHz to 960 MHz band and lets one reader identify hundreds of individually serialised items per second without line of sight. (The RFID glossary covers the terminology used here.) Ryan, who announced on the same day that she would be stepping down from the president and chief executive role, used the keynote to argue for treating RAIN RFID as plumbing rather than as a product.

“What I’m trying to represent on this slide is the concept of the RAIN technology infrastructure as a trusted item-level data platform. Get the data out, and everything else is potentially almost straightforward.”

“We defend the infrastructure”

The harder-edged part of the keynote was about who protects the conditions the technology depends on. Ryan put the Alliance’s membership at “over 200 member companies all around the world”, and framed that number as a negotiating position rather than a marketing statistic.

“If a small number of small companies went to a regulator to discuss a spectrum issue, the likelihood of them being listened to is pretty small. But if two hundred member companies, large and small, can go together and speak with one clear voice, now we have the opportunity to be heard.”

The same gap applies when policymakers write law without knowing the technology exists. “They probably don’t know anything about this technology. They probably don’t know that this technology can help them, either in the implementation of the law or in testing compliance against it.” Her summary of the job was blunt: “We defend the infrastructure. The standards, the spectrum, the regulatory environment. And that’s what enables this community to make the impact.” Then an admission you rarely hear from a stage: that this work “is costly and time-consuming”, that a large share of membership fees goes on it every year, and that “in my opinion, we need to be spending more”. For a live example of why spectrum defence is not an abstraction, see our explainer on what NextNav’s 900 MHz plan would mean for RAIN RFID worldwide.

Eight awards, six collected in person

Ryan called the awards “my favourite part of the whole event”. Eight were presented, six collected on stage. The lifetime achievement award went to Decathlon’s RFID and traceability leader, Herve d’Halluin, who Ryan said “has led probably the single biggest retail deployment on the planet” and who has also served several years on the Alliance’s board of directors. Decathlon has applied a RAIN tag to every product it sells since 2019. His acceptance speech was about collective action rather than technology.

“Some of you guys are individuals and some are producers, but within this group, we manage to find some commonalities. And when we decide to do something, we go there and we go there together, and that’s where we get some success.”

The other awards recognised work that is almost invisible from outside the Alliance: representation to the European Commission on digital product passports, chairing the Asia Pacific advisory council, government affairs and spectrum defence, the RAIN Communication Interface simulator and the push to get RAIN support into smartphone operating systems, and encoding. On that last one, Ryan made the point that matters most to anyone starting a deployment: “If you get the encoding wrong, everything else is wrong too.”

Tageos: 42.7 billion tags, and 0.5 per cent of the opportunity

Matthieu Picon, co-founder and chief executive of Tageos, took the “next 100 billion tags” slot. Tageos is a French RFID inlay and label manufacturer based in Montpellier, with plants in Asia and the United States, best known for paper-based constructions that strip plastic and adhesive out of the tag. It ships to 49 countries and sells only through partners.

Picon was unusually honest about a flat year. RAIN Alliance members shipped 42.7 billion UHF tag chips in 2025, short of expectations, which he put down to “very challenging international and commercial tensions”; he expects 2026 to recover “in the range of fifty billion”. Set against that, his estimate of the headroom was the figure worth writing down.

“We estimate only 0.5 per cent of RAIN potentially connected items are today connected.”

Four forces will close that gap, he said: regulation, with digital product passports and food traceability rules both demanding “accessible and trustworthy product information”; the economics of visibility; automation, because “labour costs are increasing” while “workforce availability is decreasing”; and customer experience, from self-checkout to product authentication. The AI argument was the one he pressed hardest, and it was a warning rather than a pitch.

“We need to understand where the items are, when they move, real-time data. Otherwise it will just be guessing, and the outcome will be certainly disappointing. So AI will have to rely on the physical layers we are providing.”

Inditex: from a price tag that kept falling off to 5,000 readers at the door

Ivan Escudero, head of RFID at Inditex, gave the deployment history. Inditex is the Spanish fashion group behind Zara, Massimo Dutti and Bershka, and has run RAIN RFID at item level for well over a decade. He opened on the business problem, not the technology: Inditex shop floors carry deliberately low quantities, often “one per size”, with the bulk of inventory in a stockroom next door. “The combination with the high traffic that we are having in the store is difficult to manage. So it is a very challenging environment that we need to solve with some technology.”

The first attempt put the tag in the price ticket. “We felt uncomfortable having it there because it was falling a lot and was not so accurate,” Escudero said. Inditex moved to a reusable hard tag instead, encoded per article in the distribution centre through RFID tunnels, with the algorithms written in house; he thanked Sensormatic and Checkpoint for their part in that. What followed in store was stocktake that is “very quick and very accurate”, replenishment driven off the sales floor, size availability checked while the customer waits, and a tool he described as “like WhatsApp, giving a message to someone in the stockroom to take the garment and give it to the customer”. Flagships of more than 4,000 square metres, laid out by ambiance rather than category, have pushed Inditex into locating articles automatically using fixed anchors.

The headline figure concerned loss prevention. Inditex has spent years trying to retire the detachable hard tag, which slows the till in stores seeing “more than 10,000 people a day”, in favour of RAIN tags built into the garment and readers at the entrance. Early trials went badly, with readers interfering with each other, “but now we have installed more than 5,000 RFID readers in all our stores at the entrance, and we are using RFID technology for anti-theft”. Because the system knows which item walked out, the alarm is informative rather than merely loud: stock is adjusted the moment it fires, and if sales do not subsequently appear against that item, “we assume that this was a theft”, with an app showing each store the value lost.

Escudero listed five requirements the replacement had to meet. It must not constrain the garment’s design, it must cost roughly what a hard tag costs, it must be quick to reactivate, it must be secure enough for detection, and it must be as durable as the tag it replaces. The answer was to stop treating the tag as one thing in one place: “Some garments have one, some garments have two. There is one in the brand label, another in the colour label. There is in every part of the garment.” He credited Avery Dennison with that development work and said implementation is complete across four of the group’s brands. The result he cared about was simpler than any of it: “we are very comfortable having no queues in the store”.

Closing the loop: what recycling actually needs from a tag

The session closed with a panel, “Closing the Loop: RAIN in Action Across Retail, Recycling and the Green Transition”, moderated by Dr Susanne Guth-Orlowski, the RAIN Alliance’s digital product passport specialist. A digital product passport is the EU requirement that a product carry a data carrier linking to structured information about what it contains, where it came from and how it should be handled at end of life; we have covered what the EU DPP Registry rules mean for RFID separately.

Dan McGrath, JD Group head of customer operations at JD Sports, the UK-headquartered sports fashion retailer, described a rollout measured in months: “It’s been a 14-month journey for us, and we’ve had a massive acceleration programme in terms of global adoption of RFID.” JD took 1,000 directly managed stores live in that window, and 2,700 across the wider group, work the retailer has since described as the end of phase one. What the data is for reaches past stock accuracy: “it’s very much about the transfer of ownership of that product from a factory to a brand, to also the retailer, but then also to the end consumer”. That chain of custody feeds ESG reporting, resale and authentication in a market where “there are a lot of fake goods”.

Hans Petter Hübert, director of strategic initiatives at Kezzler, the Norwegian traceability software company running digital product passport pilots inside the EU’s CIRPASS-2 project, made the carrier argument plainly. Kezzler is carrier agnostic as a data management provider, but “if you look at the core of the DPP requirement, it’s really to embed products with a data carrier. We want to follow the product from creation to end of life. And there’s only one technology that can support that at scale today.” The bottleneck, he added, is not the radio: “It is a data management challenge. And no matter what sector you’re in, you will have data scattered around in various systems and in various companies.” Tags that survive a garment’s whole life without contaminating the recycling stream already exist and are “probably too costly for many”, but the extra cost “at some point in the future will be worth it”.

The most useful contribution came from Gabriel Gomez, technical advisor at EuRIC, the European Recycling Industries’ Confederation, where he leads the mechanical tyre recycling branch. Recyclers have no stake in which technology wins; they care about throughput and contamination.

“For the case of tyres, we are very hopeful for RFID, in the sense that it is a solution that shows itself. Also, it’s not entirely geometry dependent, which is another one of the requirements. We’re talking about people who are handling thousands of articles per minute.”

His statement of the industry’s core problem was the clearest expression of the circularity case anyone made all morning: “The breaking point for the tyre recycling industry, and generally for the recycling industry and for the waste management industry, is really to know, once something enters the waste stream, what to do with it, and that comes with better sorting. If we have a tag that says this sort of thing, this and that, I can decide, I am going to put it this or there.” On the data volume that implies, he was blunt: “The amount of data that we are going to be generating is not something that we can handle manually. We’re going to need some support, some artificial support.”

Pressed on what “does not disturb the process” means in practice, Gomez was concrete. Quality thresholds differ by waste stream, so “I can give you 20 different answers”, but today a tag is harmless because “we just shred it”; the risk arrives when a recyclate has to meet a specification and the tag has pushed its metal content up. He also reported learning at the previous day’s tyre workshop, “less than 24 hours ago”, that tags can carry temperature and pressure sensing. Recycling plants lose time and material to fires started by batteries in the waste stream, and active sensing of those parameters “would be a game changer”. Guth-Orlowski took that as the argument for the event itself, noting how often a supply chain this large only discovers such things by sitting in the same room.

Ten cents, and a wash standard that does not exist yet

Asked what new requirements end users will place on RAIN tags, McGrath went straight at durability and price. It “comes down to cost”: “Woven into a care label, or we’re going to heat seal for a trainer, you’re probably looking at around 10 cents a tag, and you then, as a CFO of the brand, factor that into the amount of product that you produce every year.” Durability, when Guth-Orlowski asked him to define it, turned out to mean something the industry does not currently specify at all.

“We have care labels on the product that says 40 degrees or hand wash. But if you then got a tag as part of that care label, does that tag standard actually cover that? How many times can I wash it before the tag degrades and can’t be read anymore? As a brand, you need to make a decision on not just a tag standard, but a wear standard for that tag.”

His concern was not the first purchase but the next one. Brands “are going to spend a significant amount of money, that needs to be the right decision for a good few years. Not, oh, we’ve got this new tag standard now, and this new tag standard, then it’s this forever perpetual cycle of replacing tags.” A tag expected to live in a product for that product’s whole life, feed a digital product passport and still read correctly on a sorting line is a materially different specification from one that only has to survive a season on a shop floor. Nobody on the stage claimed it exists today. More from the sector in our retail RFID coverage and on the RAIN in Action summit page.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Store counts are the easy part of this story to report and the least interesting part of it. The number that matters sits in the middle of McGrath’s post, and it is the one JD had no power to instruct: over the same fourteen months to September 2026, source tagging across JD’s brand partners rose from around 40% of product to 73%.

The number JD could not mandate

Source tagging means the RFID label or hang tag is applied at the point of manufacture, by the supplier, rather than being stuck on later by the retailer in a distribution centre or a stockroom. For a retailer of JD’s shape it is the only version of item-level tagging that scales. JD is a multi-brand retailer: the shelves carry other companies’ products, made in other companies’ factories, under other companies’ tagging policies. A retailer can buy readers, write software and train staff entirely on its own authority. It cannot order a global sportswear brand to add an inlay to a garment tag at source.

So moving that figure from roughly 40% to 73% was a supply-chain persuasion exercise rather than a technology project, and it is the part of the programme least likely to be repeatable by anyone who assumes the hard bit is the hardware. McGrath’s own framing is that the work was about “changing behaviours, processes and mindsets” rather than “scanners, tags and technology”, and he credits the shift to brand partners increasingly recognising what RFID offers in their own retail formats and supply chains, not to pressure from JD.

That 27% gap is not a rounding error either. It is the ceiling on everything else the programme is being built towards. A store cannot behave as a reliable real-time inventory node if roughly a quarter of the units on its shelves carry no tag at all, because the untagged quarter is invisible to every count, every availability check and every downstream system that consumes the data. Read rates on passive UHF RAIN RFID in apparel and footwear are high enough that the tagged population can be trusted; the untagged population cannot be inferred.

What was actually deployed

The platform underneath the programme is ItemOptix, the RFID inventory management software from Checkpoint Systems, a supplier of retail loss prevention and RFID systems. JD signed a multi-year global software agreement covering its Sports Fashion Group stores, beginning in Europe. Notably, JD’s own IT team integrated the RFID processes into JD’s existing store software using Checkpoint’s ItemOptix SDK, rather than handing colleagues a separate application to learn beside the till system they already used. For a rollout measured in stores per week, that decision matters more than it sounds: it removes an entire category of training and change resistance.

Two other suppliers sit either side of the software, and neither has been named in the coverage of this milestone. Zebra Technologies, the enterprise mobile computing firm whose handheld computers are the default in warehouse and retail scanning, supplied the handheld RFID readers. Renovotec, a UK rugged hardware and mobility integrator, acted as the UK deployment and support partner. Between them they cover the two jobs that quietly sink RFID rollouts, which are getting working hardware into a thousand buildings and keeping it working afterwards.

In the distribution network, JD runs fixed tunnel readers, which are RFID portals mounted over a conveyor that read every tag in a carton as it passes through without anyone handling the goods. The Rochdale site near Manchester in the UK went in first, followed by Heerlen in the Netherlands serving continental Europe, with a stated throughput of up to 540,000 items per hour.

The results that justified all of it came from a deliberately small pilot: five stores in the UK, France and Spain in the second half of 2024, which returned a 12% increase in on-shelf availability, a 20% improvement in restocking speed and a 95% increase in items found. From that proof of concept to a full enterprise rollout took 76 working days, McGrath told Retail Technology Innovation Hub in January 2026. The UK and Ireland leg alone was 414 stores in 16 weeks, a pace of 25 stores a week, supported by a week-long immersive change and culture programme that trained 26 retail Change Champions.

Phase One complete is not rollout complete

It is worth being precise about what has finished, because the headline figures invite a bigger reading than they support. The 1,000 stores are the ones JD directly launched, which in McGrath’s wording covers “everything we directly control”. The wider group number he gives, 2,700 live of 4,800, leaves roughly 2,100 stores outside the programme, largely franchise and brand-partner estates where JD’s operating control is limited or indirect. Reaching 2,700 stores in fourteen months across that many territories is a genuinely large piece of work by any retail standard. It is also, by JD’s own accounting, a bit over half of the group.

Confidence rather than accuracy

What makes the source-tagging figure strategically loaded rather than merely operational is where McGrath says the programme is heading. In a May 2026 Retail Technology Innovation Hub interview he opened with “I hate RFID. Not because it doesn’t work. Not because it isn’t valuable. But because most of the industry is still looking at it through the wrong lens”. His objection is to the measure the sector reports. “Accuracy is a report. Confidence is a decision,” he said, and “what’s the point in being 98% accurate, if an agent can’t trust that last 2%?”

The destination he describes is machine-readable inventory. “Stores stop being places with stock and start becoming real-time, queryable inventory nodes,” he said, and “We’re building infrastructure for machines to trade physical goods.” His summary of the shift is blunt: “RFID isn’t a store ops tool anymore. It’s a confidence engine for agentic commerce”. He also noted that he chose Checkpoint Systems and ItemOptix specifically because it is “a fully serviceable, API first RFID platform”, which is a coherent choice if the long-term consumer of the data is software rather than a store manager.

He is dismissive of where the rest of the sector has its attention: “The industry is still talking about cycle counts”. The uncomfortable implication for anyone agreeing with him is that the agentic-commerce case rests entirely on tag coverage. An API-first platform, tunnel readers at 540,000 items an hour and 2,700 live stores are all necessary and none of them are sufficient while 27% of product arrives untagged.

The question left open

Which brand partners moved, and what moved them, is the part of this programme nobody has published. A jump from roughly 40% to 73% of product in fourteen months implies specific commercial conversations with specific suppliers, and the arguments that worked in those rooms are considerably more valuable to the rest of retail than another set of store counts. The same goes for the remaining 27%. Whether that tail closes through supplier economics, through JD tagging at its own distribution centres as a stopgap, or not at all, is the thing to watch in Phase Two.

Read more at https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7510307314281844736/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

C&A is a clothing retailer of European origin, trading in Brazil since 1976 and listed on the São Paulo stock exchange B3 since 2019. As of September 2026 it runs 339 Brazilian stores and employs around 15,000 people there. The format it is rolling out across that estate, called Energia, shows what six years of item-level tagging lets a fashion chain build on top.

The tag layer, laid down in 2020

The project began in June 2020 at the Shopping Tamboré store in Barueri, São Paulo state, with Sensormatic Solutions, a retail loss prevention and inventory intelligence vendor, supplying the tags and software plus consulting, installation, training and project management. The pilot was scoped at ten stores: Tamboré, two in Rio de Janeiro, one in Brasília, one in Belo Horizonte and five more in São Paulo.

The numbers quoted then were the familiar ones for apparel: a read rate of around 250 items per minute, inventory accuracy up to 95%, and lost online sales from abandoned orders cut by up to half. GS1 Brasil, the Brazilian arm of the standards body behind the barcode and the EPC numbering scheme RFID tags carry, wrote the project up in October 2020 and put the ceiling higher, above 98% accuracy per item, the payoff being fewer markdowns and stock exposed to the digital store down to the last unit. C&A had more than 280 stores in Brazil at that point.

No source states a frequency band or air interface for C&A’s tags, and the retailer has not disclosed one. As generic context, reading hundreds of garments a minute and counting a whole shop floor is the application class served by passive UHF RAIN RFID, defined by EPC Gen2 and ISO/IEC 18000-63.

Francislei Donatti, then Vice-President of Commercial Operations at C&A, put the pilot in omnichannel terms. “With this system in our stores, we are achieving much greater accuracy and consequently providing faster responses about product availability,” he said. The commercial logic is a figure C&A cites repeatedly: around 80% of customers entering one of its physical stores say they researched the product online first.

From ten stores to a national programme

Scaling was quick. By September 2021 C&A had 100 stores live on RFID across 125 cities in Brazil, with a target of 200 by the end of that year. Alan Yarschel, Supply Chain Director at C&A, described the aim as pushing stock accuracy above 95% in order to grow e-commerce, and the reported result was that the assortment visible to online customers nearly doubled. Tagging does not add stock. It makes existing stock sellable by making the count trustworthy enough to publish.

Sensormatic said in 2021 that more than 10,000 stores used its RFID solution, and the 2021 coverage cited deployments at Zara, Macy’s, Sears and Lululemon as showing average sales increases of around 10%, the figure that keeps recurring across fashion retail rollouts. Vanessa do Valle, Business Developer Manager at Sensormatic Solutions, had called the direction in 2020, with interest in the firm’s RFID offering up around 40% in the preceding months: “the use of RFID technology should increase substantially soon and become established as a trend in the retail sector.”

What Energia stacks on the tag layer

Energia is where six years of tagging stop being a stock control story. Self-checkout is the obvious beneficiary: an untagged apparel basket has to be scanned garment by garment, which is the job shoppers are worst at, while a tagged basket reads in one pass. Payment sits on top of that, including facial biometric authentication marketed as “pay with a smile” for holders of the C&A Pay digital card, which the retailer says verifies a purchase in seconds.

Fitting rooms carry totems that let a customer request another size or colour without getting dressed again, which only works if the system knows, to the unit and in real time, what is on the floor and in the stockroom. Where nearby stores do not have the item, staff can locate it elsewhere and arrange home delivery.

The C&A app carries the same data into the customer’s hand: scan a product, check real-time availability, locate a specific item inside the store, read reviews, call for staff help and complete the purchase in-app while standing in the shop. In-store product location is the feature that gives the game away. You cannot direct a shopper to a garment you cannot see, and a periodic manual count cannot see it. Retail RFID is usually sold on shrink and accuracy; here it is the addressing system for the shop floor.

The format becomes the standard

The first Energia store opened at Shopping Center Norte in São Paulo’s North Zone on 22 August 2025, around 3,400 square metres over two floors, also by Gensler, with an open shopfront and no display windows, zones for jeans, basics, the ACE sportswear line and the Mindse7 contemporary line, and a cafeteria run with the chain The Coffee. “This new concept crystallises our Energia strategy, providing customers with broader assortment and great product value perception,” said Paulo Correa, CEO of C&A Brasil, who added that it would be tested for several months before becoming the official model for refits and new stores in 2026. C&A operated over 300 Brazilian stores at that point.

The test became the rollout. At the BarraShopping reopening on 9 August 2026 the company had 26 stores in the city of Rio, 47 across the state and three units nationally on the format. Two more followed in September 2026: Butantã Shopping in western São Paulo, managed by Carrefour Property, opened on Thursday 20 September at over 1,500 square metres with Click and Collect and self-checkout, taking the chain to 176 stores in the Southeast region and 50 in the city of São Paulo, and a store of over 1,300 square metres opened at the Iguatemi mall in São José do Rio Preto on 22 September 2026.

The open question about paying with a smile

The biometric element deserves more scrutiny than the launch coverage gave it. “Pay with a smile” is facial recognition in a shop, and facial geometry is biometric data. Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados, the LGPD, in force since 2020, treats biometric data as sensitive personal data, with narrower lawful bases than ordinary personal data and, in most commercial cases, a requirement for specific and highlighted consent.

Nothing in the reporting suggests C&A handles this improperly. What the reporting does not do is say how enrolment works: whether a C&A Pay cardholder opts in explicitly and separately, what becomes of the facial template, where it is stored, how long it is kept and how consent is withdrawn. Those answers decide whether a feature like this is a convenience or a compliance problem, and none of the coverage of the Energia stores addresses them. An RFID tag identifies a garment. A face identifies a person.

Tags as substrate, not as a stock tool

Most RFID coverage in apparel stops at accuracy and shrink, because that is where the business case is easiest to write. C&A Brasil shows what happens after that case is won. The 2020 Tamboré pilot was sold on inventory accuracy and abandoned online orders; six years on, the same tag data lets a shopper check a size from the fitting room, find a rail from a phone and leave through a self-checkout without staff touching the garments. For anyone weighing a first garment tagging pilot, the question is not what accuracy figure the tags deliver next year, but what the business can build in 2032 because the data exists.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

SSC Napoli is the Serie A football club of Naples. Its centenary shirt went on sale on 6 July 2026 at 150 euros through official club stores, made by EA7, the sportswear line of Giorgio Armani, and designed by Valentina De Laurentiis with a nod to a championship shirt of the 1980s. The anti-counterfeiting measure was the part the club led with: an NFC chip embedded in the “Authentic” patch.

What the patch was supposed to prove

Near Field Communication is a short range wireless standard operating at 13.56 MHz, readable by almost any modern smartphone held within a few centimetres of the tag. Enable NFC, hold the handset against the patch, and the phone opens a link. On a genuine shirt the screen read “Complimenti, hai acquistato una Maglia Authentic. Sei un vero Tifoso Azzurro”, which translates as “Congratulations, you have bought an Authentic shirt. You are a true Azzurri fan”. The tap also unlocked content reserved for owners: historical match footage, unreleased images and messages from players. Tap a fake and nothing happened at all.

The claim made at launch is worth recording precisely, because it is the claim the later reporting destroys. SpazioNapoli, covering the release on 6 July 2026, wrote that the chip “communicates directly with the club’s servers, guaranteeing a higher level of security compared to traditional systems”, and that it redirected automatically to the official store rather than behaving like a simple QR code. Owners of counterfeit shirts, the piece said, would never reach those privileges. AreaNapoli and CalcioNapoli24 ran the same framing.

Twenty euros buys a working authenticity chip

Two months later the separation had gone. According to the Fanpage.it investigation, counterfeit centenary shirts produced in Hong Kong reproduce the NFC tag closely enough that they not only survive the check but return the identical congratulatory message from the club. The price list is the detail that lands. A plain counterfeit without NFC sells for 15 to 18 euros. An “authentic” counterfeit with a working chip sells for 20 euros, for buyers prepared to accept a shipment from Hong Kong. On the street in Naples the same shirt changes hands at around 45 euros.

Canale 8 reported the same finding, describing fraudulent versions that are indistinguishable from genuine merchandise and that display identical authentication messages when scanned. The broadcaster closed on a play on an Italian saying, “fatta la maglia, trovato l’inganno”, a twist on the proverb that no sooner is a law made than the way around it is found.

A static tag is a barcode you cannot see

Fanpage.it notes that Certilogo still works and remains the reliable check on these shirts. That is the technical crux of the story. Certilogo is an Italian product authentication service that issues a unique code per individual garment and validates it server side against a database, which also watches for duplicate codes and for scan patterns that look wrong, such as the same code being checked from twenty countries in a week. The value sits in the database, not in the label.

The NFC patch, on the evidence available, does something much simpler. It appears to resolve to a URL that returns a generic congratulation to anybody who asks. An NFC tag of this kind holds an NDEF message, the standard container format that carries the payload, in this case almost certainly a web address. Anyone who taps a genuine shirt can read that payload with a free phone app and write the same bytes to a blank NDEF tag costing a few pence. There is no cryptography in that exchange, no secret unique to the individual item, and no server side test of whether the tag presenting the URL is the tag that was originally issued.

So a static NFC tag is a barcode you cannot see. It is perfectly good at delivering content to a buyer and completely useless as proof of provenance, because the thing it proves is only that someone wrote the right URL onto a chip.

The chips to do this properly have existed for years

This is precisely the failure mode that modern NFC authentication was designed to remove, and the components are ordinary commercial product. Tags with per tap cryptographic signatures generate a different code on every single read, derived from a counter and a key that never leaves the silicon. The server checks the signature against its own copy of the key, confirms the counter has advanced rather than repeated, and only then returns a verdict. Copy the URL from such a tag and the clone fails on the second tap, because a replayed code is a code the server has already seen. At volume these chips cost cents, not euros.

Encrypted authentication platforms such as Veribli work on the same logic, pairing a per item credential with a back end that verifies it, rather than leaving a fixed payload sitting in the open on the garment. Whatever the supplier, a brand should be asking two questions before it puts the word “Authentic” on a patch: is the tag signing anything, and is anyone monitoring duplicate and anomalous scans.

Napoli either did not specify a tag of that class or specified one and left the feature switched off. Either way the conclusion is not that NFC fails against counterfeiters. It is that the club marketed a static tag as proof of authenticity, and the counterfeiters read the brief.

The same trick with a QR code in 2023

None of this is new. In 2023 the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial police, seized more than 18,000 counterfeit Napoli items in a warehouse at San Giuseppe Vesuviano, near Naples, sourced from Turkey. The fakes reproduced the 2022-23 special edition carrying the EA7 logo and the D10S inscription, the tribute to Diego Maradona, and each one carried a working QR code that pointed at Armani’s official website to create the impression of certification. Sold openly as counterfeits at around 40 euros each they represented over 800,000 euros of goods, and passed off as genuine they could have fetched up to 85 euros each. Sixteen people were reported to the authorities. Same trick, earlier technology, three years ahead of the NFC version.

What has not been established

Several things remain open and are worth stating plainly rather than assuming. Nobody has publicly established which chip SSC Napoli used, or confirmed by testing that the tag is genuinely static rather than carrying a rolling parameter that the club is failing to validate. The mechanism described above is inferred from the reported behaviour, not demonstrated. Neither SSC Napoli, EA7 nor Certilogo has commented publicly on the Fanpage.it findings as of September 2026.

What is established is the outcome. A supporter in Naples in September 2026 can hold a phone against a patch, read a message from the club congratulating them on their authentic shirt, and be holding a 20 euro copy from Hong Kong. More on the technology and where it works properly is in our NFC coverage.

Read more at https://fanpage.it/napoli/la-beffa-le-maglie-contraffatte-del-calcio-napoli-superano-lo-stesso-controllo-di-autenticita-di-quelle-originali

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

lululemon is the Vancouver-based technical apparel brand founded in 1998, best known for yoga and training wear and now a global multichannel retailer. Wuhan is its third distribution hub in mainland China, after Shanghai and Guangzhou, built in partnership with SF Express, China’s largest express parcel and integrated logistics group. It also houses what the brand calls its first global comprehensive service centre, offering alterations, tailoring and customisation to customers nationally through both online and physical store channels.

The RFID read comes first, everything else follows

An RFID tunnel reader is a shrouded arch fitted with antennas: cartons or totes pass through it and every tagged item inside is read in bulk, with nobody pointing a scanner at anything. In apparel it is the standard way to verify a carton’s contents in a second or two rather than opening it. At Wuhan, tunnel readers sit on the inbound line alongside static DWS equipment, which stands for dimensioning, weighing and scanning: a station that captures a case’s size and weight in passing, for cubing and carrier rating. Unloading robots and AGVs, automated guided vehicles that move pallets and cases without a driver, feed the line. Chinese trade coverage described the result as second-level archiving: the goods-in record is written within seconds of arrival, with no manual scan step.

What the read produces is an EPC-level record. EPC stands for Electronic Product Code, the scheme that gives every tagged item a unique serial identity rather than a product code shared with every other garment of the same style and size. That distinction is the whole point: a barcode tells you what the item is, an EPC tells you which one it is. lululemon and SF are using that serialised identity to carry traceability from goods-in through storage, handling, picking, buffering and despatch verification, all held on SF’s Baichuan platform.

The automation the read feeds

Storage is built on an AirRob vertical system, credited in the launch coverage with roughly three times the density of a conventional warehouse and more than 4,000 cases an hour. Outbound uses high-speed swing and cross-belt sorters. The returns operation, always the awkward end of apparel logistics, runs to more than 160 standard workstations with high-speed sortation and singulation equipment. Singulation is the step that separates a jumbled bulk flow into a single stream of one item at a time, spaced out so a sorter or a reader can deal with each one individually.

Above all of that sits Baichuan’s AI layer, which the coverage says handles wave aggregation, replenishment decisions, case optimisation and sortation scheduling. Those decisions are only as good as the data beneath them, which is why the serialised read at the door matters more than any single piece of mechanical handling.

Coverage, and the SF Express relationship

As of the September 2026 launch the Wuhan centre handles around 50% of lululemon’s China retail and e-commerce fulfilment. Once fully ramped it is projected to serve as the primary distribution point for 85 stores across 18 provinces, with a 99% next-day delivery rate claimed for the e-commerce regions it covers.

SF Express has been working with lululemon since 2022, expanding from parcel delivery into warehouse fulfilment and supply chain digitalisation. Its technology arm markets an RFID offering under the Fengzhixing name, aimed at factories, warehouses, distribution, transfer hubs and stores, with footwear and apparel among its named target sectors. SF publishes no technical specifications for that product, so no operating frequency, read rate, range or standards conformance has been stated for the Wuhan deployment. Tunnel reading and EPC-level item traceability in apparel are conventionally done with UHF RAIN RFID, but that is general industry practice rather than a published specification of this installation.

Consistent with a long-standing approach

lululemon has leaned on RFID network-wide for years. In March 2020, chief executive Calvin McDonald said of the company’s pandemic response: “Our technology with the use of RFID we can access product at any point across our network, not just DCs but at our stores as well from ship from store.” That visibility across both distribution centres and shops let it shift stock away from closed stores and fulfil online orders from wherever the goods sat.

Wuhan is not the only build-out in progress. Separately, lululemon celebrated a distribution centre of over one million square feet at Brampton, Ontario on 8 July 2026, operational from June 2026 and serving e-commerce in eastern Canada and the eastern United States. That Canadian site uses an AutoStore installation with 292,000 bins, 525 R5 Pro robots and eight kilometres of conveyance. RFID was not mentioned in the Brampton announcement, and the two facilities should not be conflated.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

NFC is the short-range, 13.56 MHz HF flavour of RFID that every modern smartphone can read without any extra hardware, which is what makes it the default choice for consumer-facing product authentication. The company says it builds both the hardware and the software, using radio frequency alone to certify that a product is unique, and that the approach scales from a few hundred pieces a year to millions. Everything below is drawn from Autentico’s own product page as of September 2026, and the company publishes no independent test results, so treat the claims as vendor statements rather than verified performance.

The label is made smart before it reaches the bottling line

The most practical idea in the system is also the least glamorous one. Rather than asking a producer to redesign packaging or bolt a tag applicator onto an existing line, Autentico asks the customer to post in their existing reels of adhesive labels. The company runs them through what it calls an Insert Label Machine, which places a tag into each label, and sends the reels back. The labels then go through the same labelling head they always did. The company says the customer does not have to change their production process at all, and that it can handle any type of paper adhesive label reel.

Autentico calls the result an “etichetta parlante”, a talking label, built around what it names a DNA Tag: the idea being that the product speaks for itself rather than relying on a certificate in a drawer somewhere. For a small winery or a single-estate oil producer, avoiding a capital purchase and a line change is often the difference between doing a traceability project and shelving one.

Wine, oil, shoes and the awkward case of metal

The applications the company lists map onto the sectors where Italian provenance carries the biggest price premium. On wine bottles the tag sits inside the adhesive label, protected from handling and from the wet, cold conditions of a chiller but still readable through the paper. On olive oil the argument is about substantiating a specific claim: organic certification, or a particular pressing method, tied to the individual bottle rather than to a batch code. On shoes, Autentico says artisanal production can be protected and the process automated to the point of recording photographs of the manufacturing steps, so the buyer can see the shoes being made.

Metal boxes get their own entry, and the company is right to flag it as a special case. Metal detunes an HF antenna and can kill a read outright, so tagging metal products means selecting a tag built with a ferrite layer or an on-metal construction rather than reaching for a standard inlay. Autentico says tagging metal requires care both in choosing the correct tag and in managing the stored data.

The named customers indicate the end of the market being targeted. Cantina Santadi is a co-operative winery founded in 1960 in the Sulcis region of south west Sardinia, with around 200 member growers farming over 650 hectares, and is widely regarded as the benchmark producer of Carignano del Sulcis. Dal Forno Romano is a Valpolicella estate at Cellore d’Illasi in Veneto, making wine under that name since 1983 and treated by collectors as a reference point for Amarone. Also listed are Colle Massari, where Autentico says it applies and reads HF NFC tags on wooden crates including non-standard sizes, the citrus grower Arance Campanella, the pasta producer Amandafood, Sterylab, and unnamed high-end electronics manufacturers.

Reading the map, not just the tag

The geolocation piece is what separates this from a simple authenticity check. Autentico says that when a tag is read, the platform records the product’s position in real time, and that producers can view georeferenced reads through a web back end where they also manage product cards and distributors. That turns an anti-counterfeiting tool into a distribution-control tool: if bottles allocated to one national distributor keep being tapped in a different country, the brand owner has evidence of parallel trade rather than a suspicion. For premium drinks and footwear brands, grey market leakage is frequently a larger and more constant financial problem than outright forgery.

What an NFC tag can and cannot prove

It is worth being precise about what consumer tap-to-verify demonstrates, because the marketing around it is often looser than the engineering. A tag that simply returns a static serial number can be read by anyone with a phone and written to a blank tag, so a plain UID proves very little on its own. Robust schemes use cryptographic authentication in the chip, the best known approach being the secure unique NFC message, where the tag computes a fresh message authentication code on every tap using a key that never leaves the silicon, so a URL replayed from a cloned tag fails verification at the server.

Autentico’s page does not name a chip, a standard or an authentication method, so there is no way to tell from it which of these approaches is in use, and readers evaluating the system should ask. One clue cuts both ways: the company says Autentico NFC can identify an original product with no internet connection. Offline verification is genuinely useful in a cellar or a warehouse with poor signal, but it means the check is being made inside the app rather than against a server, which is a meaningfully different security model and one that needs care in how keys and revocation are handled.

Why this is being sold in Italy first

The commercial backdrop is severe. Coldiretti, Italy’s largest farming association, put the damage from counterfeit and imitation Italian food at around 42 billion euros in figures reported in June 2026, of which roughly 40 billion relates to Italian-sounding food produced in the United States and about 2 billion to outright counterfeits of Italian products. Olive oil and wine are perennial targets precisely because origin is the product.

Regulation is heading the same way. Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the 2025 to 2030 working plan gives 2027 as the indicative year for adopting the ecodesign measure covering textiles, apparel and footwear, with Digital Product Passport obligations following roughly 18 months after a delegated act enters into force. Producers already carrying a unique, item-level digital identity on each product will start that work from a better position than those who are not. Autentico also sells a companion product it calls Autentico CHAIN for distribution using RFID, along with HF and UHF tunnels, handheld and tablet readers and UHF gates. More on tagging at the pack and item level is collected in the smart packaging and NFC sections.

Read more at https://prodottoautentico.it/anticontraffazione-vino-moda-olio-nfc/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

GreyOrange is a US headquartered warehouse and retail automation company, known first for its GreyMatter fulfilment orchestration software and the mobile robots that run under it. Its retail product, gStore, is a store inventory and fulfilment platform that ingests RFID reads alongside sales data to hold a live picture of what is on the shop floor and what is in the stockroom. H&M Group is the Swedish fashion retailer behind H&M, COS, Arket and Weekday, and operates in the region of 4,000 stores worldwide.

Read the 3,800 figure carefully

That last number matters, because the headline figure is easy to misread and several syndications of the announcement have misread it. The 3,800 locations are GreyOrange’s total installed base across every customer it has, not H&M’s store estate. H&M Group’s own footprint on the platform is described only as “hundreds of retail locations spanning three continents”, plus GreyMatter orchestration across multiple distribution centres. Because H&M runs roughly 4,000 stores in total, 3,800 sits close enough to look like a full chain rollout. It is not one.

GreyOrange’s other figures give a better sense of scale: roughly 200 million retail inventory items under management through gStore, more than one billion US dollars of inventory moving through its systems each month, and 130,000 hardware and software agents across stores and warehouses globally, 100,000 of them added in the two years to September 2026. All are vendor supplied and unaudited, and “agents” is GreyOrange’s own unit covering everything from a robot to a software process, so it is not comparable to a reader count.

Overhead readers change what inventory accuracy means

The technical substance here is the shift from periodic to continuous reading, and the two approaches produce numbers that look alike and behave nothing alike. Handheld UHF RFID cycle counting is the established method in fashion retail: an associate walks the floor with a handheld reader, sweeps the fixtures and produces a count. It is fast, cheap in capital terms, and accurate on the day it is done. But it is a snapshot. From the moment the count finishes, every sale, every return and every garment carried into a fitting room and abandoned there degrades it, and in a busy store that decay is measured in hours. Counting weekly means working from data that is usually several days old.

Fixed overhead readers mounted in the ceiling read the same tags continuously, so the output is a rolling state rather than a count. That supports tasks such as “this fixture is empty now” instead of “this SKU was short on Tuesday”. GreyOrange has claimed since January 2024 that gStore with overhead reading holds item level inventory accuracy at around 99%, against roughly 90% for traditional point in time cycle counting, and locates items to within three to five feet. That precision is enough to say which fixture or zone an item is in. It is not enough to say which peg, and any deployment plan assuming otherwise will disappoint.

gStore is sensor agnostic, using hardware from suppliers such as Zebra and Keonn rather than a reader line of its own. The economics split cleanly too: overhead arrays suit high volume stores where continuous data pays for the ceiling infrastructure, while handhelds remain the sensible choice for lower volume sites. That is why the largest chains are going overhead first, and it is the same pattern visible in other overhead deployments reported during 2026.

The Zebra tie-up did the groundwork

The September 2026 milestone follows an announcement on 8 January 2026 in which GreyOrange and Zebra combined Zebra’s SmartLens overhead RFID hardware with the gStore execution platform. Overhead readers gather item level data continuously, gStore processes the reads in real time, identifies stock gaps and pushes tasks to associates on mobile devices, removing manual cycle counts and replacing reactive replenishment with scheduled work.

Two details there matter more than the headline. The combined system integrates with a retailer’s existing handheld RFID infrastructure rather than replacing it, which counts for a lot when most chains considering overhead reading have already spent years building handheld estates and tagging programmes. And the first deployment, at an unnamed national fashion retailer, reached 98% on shelf availability. That is a strong figure, but on shelf availability and inventory accuracy are different measurements, and one unnamed site is not a trend.

Troy Siwek, General Manager of gStore by GreyOrange, framed the problem as latency rather than data volume, saying retailers “don’t struggle because they lack data”, but because “they can’t act on it fast enough.” That is a fair description of where item level RFID has stalled in a lot of stores: the tags are on the garments, the reads are happening, and the resulting exception list never reaches anyone with time to walk the floor.

A warehouse relationship that grew into a store one

This is not a new partnership, which is how some coverage has framed it. H&M Group first deployed GreyMatter at a distribution centre on the US West Coast in 2021, and the store side came later. That sequence is the more interesting part of the story: a fulfilment automation supplier working from the back of the network towards the shop floor, which is the direction of travel for several vendors in this space.

Akash Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of GreyOrange, credited H&M with shaping the product rather than simply buying it, citing its “scale, operational complexity, and willingness to co-develop the future of omnichannel technology rather than simply adopt it”. David Pino, Head of Emerging Technology at H&M Group, said scaling successfully requires “specialized understanding of how stores, fulfillment operations and inventory flows work together”. Those are the quotes a press release produces, but the underlying claim, that this took five years and started in a warehouse, is checkable.

Continuous reading creates its own problem

Reading tags all day rather than once a week surfaces a difficulty handheld counting largely hides: readers do not respect the boundaries retailers care about. Stockroom stock reads as shop floor stock, a fitting room reads as a fixture, and an adjacent department’s tags bleed into a zone they do not belong to. In an open plan store that is the normal condition, not an edge case, and it is what stands between a continuous read stream and a count anyone will act on.

GreyOrange’s answer is SoftFence, announced in October 2024, a virtual shielding layer tuned per site that uses received signal strength, signal movement and angle of arrival to judge whether a tag genuinely sits inside the zone being read. Its initial focus was stray tags confusing associates during omnichannel shipping and receiving with handhelds, but the same physics applies to ceiling mounted arrays. That a vendor with this installed base needed a dedicated product for it says plainly that zone discipline, not raw read rate, is the hard engineering problem in overhead retail RFID.

Where this leaves the category

GreyOrange’s other named retail customer is Fabletics, which deployed gStore in August 2025. Keonn is named as an RFID hardware and smart mirror partner, Cognizant as a retail concept partner. Reporting by Chain Store Age on 1 September 2026 adds that gStore combines RFID reads with sales data and smart mirror interactions to build real time inventory heat maps, the same data used to flag fast moving SKUs, garments abandoned in fitting rooms and low stock alerts. The customer outcomes GreyOrange has published, a 45% productivity improvement, a 5% sales increase and 60% more daily customer assistance, all come from unnamed sites, and the accuracy numbers quoted across retail RFID have a long history of travelling without their baselines.

What is solid is the installed base. A category that was still pilot shaped five years ago now has a supplier claiming 3,800 live stores and a global fashion group running it across three continents. The open question for 2027 is whether continuous overhead reading becomes the default in high throughput fashion stores or settles as a top tier option while handhelds carry the long tail. That will turn less on reader performance than on whether retailers can restructure store labour around a task list that never stops updating, a change to how a rollout is run rather than to the technology in the ceiling.

More: retail RFID, fashion RFID, and our guide to implementing RFID for stock control and retail inventory.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The opening was announced by Landsec, the property company that owns Liverpool ONE. Pablo Sueiras, Landsec’s Head of Retail and Hospitality Leasing, said the debut “is a significant milestone for the destination and highlights its continued appeal to retailers looking to establish themselves in the UK market”. Liverpool ONE reports around 33 million visitors a year, and already houses four other Inditex brands: Zara, Bershka, Pull&Bear and Stradivarius.

Two more UK stores are scheduled: Lakeside in West Thurrock, Essex in early October 2026, and the Metrocentre in Gateshead in November 2026. With the UK addition, Lefties trades in 20 markets from 225 stores.

What the technology actually does

The RFID self-checkout described at Liverpool ONE reads a whole basket at once rather than requiring each garment to be scanned individually. Every item carries a passive UHF RFID tag in its label, and the checkout terminal reads all of the tags in range simultaneously, displaying the basket on screen for the customer to confirm before paying. Inditex has described the arrangement in its own annual reporting since 2015, siting the terminals near the fitting rooms.

This is not new for the group. Inditex has been building RFID into its store operations for over a decade, and self-checkout has reached roughly 90 per cent of transactions in its larger flagship stores, according to reporting by Computer Weekly. The company has been extending the same technology to its Bershka and Pull & Bear brands.

Why a discount brand is the more interesting test

Most coverage of this opening has treated the technology as a detail of a store launch. For anyone weighing RFID in retail, the more useful point is which brand it landed in.

Item-level RFID has always been easiest to justify at higher price points, because the tag is a fixed cost of a few pence charged against a variable margin. A tag that is trivial against a jacket selling for 79 pounds is a real line item against a t-shirt selling for six. Lefties sits at the value end of the Inditex portfolio, competing with retailers such as Primark, so deploying the full tagging and self-checkout stack there is a statement that the group believes the numbers work at low basket values.

That is worth watching rather than assuming. Inditex has advantages most retailers do not: enormous volume, a tagging operation already amortised across Zara and its other brands, and a supply chain that applies tags at source rather than in store. A single-brand retailer without those advantages should not read the Lefties deployment as evidence that the same arithmetic works for them.

The part of the Inditex RFID story that has not gone smoothly

Inditex’s tagging programme has had at least one public setback, and it is directly relevant to anyone considering RFID as a loss-prevention measure.

In 2023, Bloomberg reported that the group delayed a planned rollout of RFID-based anti-theft tagging across Zara after staff found during testing that the chips, placed in garment labels, were straightforward for shoplifters to remove. The system had been expected to reduce theft by around 60 per cent. Inditex said at the time that implementation was “going according to plan, without any significant incidents”. The company was reported to be exploring an alternative in which a miniature RFID tag is wrapped in textile yarn and sewn into a garment seam, making it considerably harder to find and remove.

RFID News has not established the current status of that programme, and the reporting above describes events in 2023 rather than the position today. It is included because it illustrates a distinction that buyers routinely get wrong.

That distinction is this: RFID and electronic article surveillance solve different problems. EAS exists to make an alarm sound when an item leaves the shop, and its hard tags are deliberately difficult to remove. RFID exists to identify individual items, which is what makes stock accuracy and self-checkout possible. A soft RFID label can do the second job extremely well and the first job poorly, because a label a customer is happy to carry home is also a label a thief can pick off. Retailers replacing hard tags with soft RFID labels are making a genuine trade: they gain inventory visibility and checkout speed, and they give up some physical deterrence. Both technologies can be run together, and in most large fashion estates they are.

What to watch

Whether RFID self-checkout proves out at value price points will show up in Inditex’s own behaviour rather than in any announcement. The signals worth tracking are whether the Lakeside and Metrocentre stores open with the same configuration in October and November 2026, and whether the group extends the arrangement to further Lefties markets.

No supplier has been named publicly for the tags, the readers or the hanger sorting equipment at Liverpool ONE.

More on the terms used in this article in the RFID glossary, and more deployment coverage in RFID in retail.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

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.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The book carries photographs Nakazato took in the Canary Islands, the trip that shaped the collection. Holding a smartphone over the embedded tag opens a dedicated website with show footage and related material, so recipients could keep exploring the collection during the week and after it closed. Murata gives the tag as 13.56 MHz with a communication distance of a few centimetres, standard for near field communication.

The collection, titled Sea of Fire INFERNO and shown on 8 July, took its cue from the black volcanic cliffs and dark water of Tenerife. Garments shifted from blue to red on the runway, borrowing from monogi, the onstage costume change used in Noh and Kyogen theatre. Epson and YKK worked on it alongside Murata. July also marked ten years since Nakazato joined the official Paris couture calendar, still the only Japanese house on it.

Why an NFC tag rather than a printed QR code

Murata’s stated design argument is straightforward. The tag does its job without appearing on the page, so no visible 2D barcode has to compete with the photography. A printed code needs to be sized for reliable scanning and placed somewhere it will not wreck the layout. An NFC inlay sits inside the paper and leaves the artwork alone. On a shipping label that is a detail; on a photobook meant to work as an object, it is the point.

The other half of the case is the reader. Current iPhones and mainstream Android handsets read NFC natively, and iOS has supported background tag reading since iOS 13, so in most cases there is no app to install and nothing to launch. That is what makes a tag workable as a fashion week giveaway, where nobody will download software to look at a book handed to them on the way out.

Paper is a harder substrate than it looks

Getting an HF inlay into a bound book is a tougher piece of engineering than a garment hangtag. The reasons below are general RFID practice, not anything Murata has said about this particular build.

• An HF antenna is tuned against everything near it, so coated stock, adhesive and moisture in the paper all shift the resonant frequency.
• Metallic ink, foil blocking and gilded page edges are common in high end print and will detune or simply shield an antenna, so tag placement has to be agreed with the print finisher, not bolted on afterwards.
• Binding, pressing and trimming stress the inlay, and a cracked antenna loop or broken IC bond cannot be repaired once the book is glued.

Murata has not published a part number, IC vendor, memory size or antenna geometry, and has not said which NFC Forum tag type the inlay uses. Broadly, a tag used this way carries an NDEF record holding a URL, which is what lets a phone open the site with nothing in between.

Where this sits in fashion’s wider NFC push

Murata’s own framing is that RFID “is increasingly being used as a means of connecting physical objects and information” across manufacturing, logistics, retail and fashion, with traceability, product authentication and distribution channel management among the applications. The company says the collaboration shows how electronic component expertise can “create new value” and “enhance experiential value across a wide range of fields.”

That is more than sponsorship copy, because the same 13.56 MHz tag class is being asked to do several jobs in fashion at once. Brands already use NFC for authentication and resale verification, and the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is pushing textiles towards item level Digital Product Passports, which need a persistent machine readable carrier on the product. A tag that opens a show film today is the same class of device that will hold a garment’s compliance record tomorrow, which is a fair argument for reading a couture giveaway as a pilot rather than a stunt.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The appointment is notable for several reasons. First, the creation of a dedicated, named RFID programme role within Primark signals that the company has moved well beyond the pilot and evaluation phase. Retailers at the early stages of RFID adoption typically fold the technology into existing IT or supply chain teams. When an organisation carves out a standalone programme with its own headcount, it points to a funded, executive-sponsored initiative with defined milestones and deliverables.

Second, the 18-month timeframe is telling. That window aligns with what the industry typically sees for a phased multi-store or multi-market rollout. It suggests Primark is planning to take RFID from a limited deployment into something considerably broader. McDermott herself described the initiative as a “global transformation programme,” which indicates the scope extends well beyond a single country or region.

Third, the choice to bring in someone from store operations rather than hiring a pure technologist speaks volumes about Primark’s approach. RFID implementations in fashion retail live or die based on how well the technology integrates with existing store processes. Cycle counting, stock replenishment from back-of-house to shop floor, and inventory accuracy at the item level all depend on frontline staff understanding and trusting the system. A programme lead who has managed stores and teams for over a decade understands those operational realities in a way that no external consultant can replicate.

For the wider retail RFID sector, this hire adds to a growing body of evidence that the technology has reached a tipping point in fashion. Primark operates more than 400 stores across 16 markets, making it one of the largest value fashion retailers in Europe and a growing presence in the United States. Any RFID programme at that scale will require significant volumes of UHF RAIN RFID inlays, encoding infrastructure, and reader hardware at both distribution centre and store level. It is the kind of deployment that moves the needle for the entire supply chain.

The timing is also worth noting. RFID has been highlighted as a key focus area for the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards, reflecting broader industry momentum around item-level tagging in fashion and general merchandise. Retailers across the sector are under increasing pressure to improve stock accuracy, reduce out-of-stocks, and support omnichannel fulfilment. RFID delivers measurable gains on all three fronts, and the business case has become harder to ignore as tag costs continue to fall and reader technology matures.

Primark’s decision to invest in a dedicated programme head, drawn from its own operational ranks, is a clear statement of intent. The next 18 months will be worth watching closely as this rollout takes shape.

Read more at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/daniellejmcdermott_im-so-excited-to-be-starting-a-new-chapter-ugcPost-7486456932711477248-V_Bh/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.