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 Counts happen a few times a year, the figure is already out of date by the time it is reconciled, and every decision taken in between rests on a number nobody quite trusts.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.