Fashion retail was the industry that proved item-level RFID could work at scale, and it remains the sector with the highest adoption rates globally. The combination of high SKU count, rapid stock turn, significant shrinkage risk, and the operational complexity of fitting rooms makes apparel a near-perfect environment for what RFID does best. Understanding how it is deployed across the full supply chain — from garment manufacture through to the fitting room and point of sale — illustrates why the technology has become close to standard in parts of the sector.

Tagging at Source

The most efficient point to apply an RFID tag to a garment is at the factory, before the item is packed. Source tagging, as it is known, means the tag is present from the moment the garment leaves production, enabling visibility at every subsequent stage of the supply chain. The tag is typically either integrated into the hang tag (the card or paper label attached by a string or pin) or sewn directly into the garment as a woven label with an embedded inlay.

Hang tag integration is the most common approach in fast fashion because it is fast and cheap to implement without changing garment manufacturing processes. The UHF inlay is laminated inside the hang tag, which is applied at the end of the production line. The disadvantage is that the tag is removed at point of sale along with the hang tag, ending its useful life. For retailers who want to extend RFID visibility into the post-sale phase — for returns processing, resale, or circular economy programmes — a sewn-in label that survives the sale is more appropriate.

Encoding at source means the EPC on each tag is linked to the specific SKU, colour, and size of the garment in the retailer’s product database. Getting this encoding right and consistent across multiple factories and suppliers is one of the more demanding aspects of a source tagging programme, requiring clear technical specifications, compliance testing, and audit processes.

Distribution Centre Operations

Tagged garments arriving at a distribution centre can be processed significantly faster than untagged ones. Cartons of hanging garments can be read in bulk as they move through tunnel readers on conveyor lines, providing item counts and SKU verification without manual scanning. Discrepancies between expected and received items are flagged automatically for investigation rather than discovered during manual audits days later.

Sortation and routing in the DC can also be driven by RFID data, directing items to the correct put-away location, pick zone, or outbound lane based on the tag read. For fashion retailers managing hundreds of stores with different stock profiles, this level of accuracy in the DC directly affects how well stores are stocked relative to demand.

Store Receiving and Floor Management

When a delivery arrives at a store, RFID makes the receiving process faster and more accurate. Associates wave a handheld reader over delivery bags or scan items through a portal reader, confirming the contents against the expected delivery manifest in seconds rather than manually checking individual barcodes. Discrepancies are identified immediately rather than surfacing as mysterious inventory shrinkage weeks later.

On the sales floor, RFID enables cycle counts that would be impractical with barcodes. A full store count that would take a team of associates several hours with barcode scanners can be completed by one or two people with handheld readers in under an hour. Some retailers run daily cycle counts of fast-moving categories. Others do full store counts multiple times a week. The result is an inventory record accurate enough to trust for replenishment decisions, BOPIS availability, and loss analysis.

Replenishment triggers driven by RFID data are one of the highest-value outputs of the system. When the floor count for a specific size and colour drops below a defined threshold, a replenishment task is generated automatically. The associate goes to the stockroom, finds the item using the handheld reader, and brings it to the floor. The manual cognitive load of knowing what needs replenishing is removed, and stock stays on the floor where it can be sold.

The Fitting Room

Fitting rooms are where RFID delivers some of its most distinctive retail applications. Items taken into a fitting room temporarily disappear from the accessible inventory on the sales floor. Without RFID, a popular size might show as available in the system but actually be sitting in a fitting room cubicle, unavailable for customers on the floor or for BOPIS picking.

RFID read points at fitting room entry and exit allow the system to track which items are currently in use and which have been returned. Some retailers have deployed interactive fitting room mirrors that display the items brought in, offer size and colour alternatives, and allow customers to request different items without leaving the cubicle. These features require knowing exactly what the customer has with them, which requires item-level RFID.

Returned items that should go back to the floor but are instead left in the fitting room represent a direct sales loss. RFID-enabled fitting room management ensures these items are flagged for return to the correct location, maintaining floor availability and reducing the number of items that drift into the sorting backlog.

Loss Prevention

Electronic article surveillance (EAS) using traditional AM or RF hard tags has been standard in apparel retail for decades. RFID-enabled EAS integrates item-level identification with the exit alarm function, meaning that when an alarm triggers, the system knows exactly which item caused it rather than simply recording that something left the store undeactivated. This itemised loss data is far more useful for loss prevention analysis than a simple alarm count, allowing retailers to identify which SKUs are targeted most frequently and adjust their protection strategy accordingly.

At the point of sale, RFID deactivation or removal is integrated into the checkout process. The tag is either killed electronically or the hard tag is physically removed. Either way, the inventory record is updated in real time, and the item transitions from store stock to sold.

Beyond the Store

As circular economy models gain traction in fashion, RFID’s role is extending beyond the first sale. Sewn-in tags that survive washing and wear can identify returned items for resale, support authentication of pre-owned garments, and provide evidence of a product’s history for sustainability reporting. Brands including Mulberry, Ralph Lauren, and several luxury houses have used NFC or UHF tags as a permanent digital identity for garments, enabling consumer-facing features alongside supply chain and retail operations. The tag that starts its life at a factory in Vietnam can still be providing value years later in a resale marketplace or a repair service.

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.

University Hospital Graz (Universitätsklinikum Graz) is one of Austria’s largest medical centres, serving tens of thousands of patients annually across dozens of clinical departments. Behind the scenes, an operation of this scale generates an enormous volume of workwear — scrubs, theatre gowns, lab coats, protective garments — that must be laundered, tracked, and returned to the right staff member at the right time. The facility processes approximately 11 tons of textile per day, and maintaining accurate circulation of that volume without RFID would be, frankly, unmanageable.

The Problem With High-Volume Hospital Laundry

Before RFID integration, large hospital laundries operated on trust and approximate stock counts. Staff would collect garments from dispensing points, send them to laundry, and hope the right items returned in reasonable time. Losses were routine. Overstocking in one department meant shortages in another. There was no way to enforce quotas, and certainly no visibility into where any individual garment was in its lifecycle — whether it was on a ward, in a laundry bag, being washed, or simply missing.

For a hospital the size of Graz, this translates to significant financial loss, compliance risk, and staff frustration when workwear simply is not available at the start of a shift.

The RFID Solution

The solution deployed at University Hospital Graz centres on UHF RFID tags sewn or heat-bonded into each garment. UHF — operating in the 860-960 MHz range under the RAIN RFID standard — is the right choice here for several reasons. It offers read ranges of several metres, allows bulk reading of many items simultaneously, and the tags are robust enough to survive industrial washing cycles repeatedly over the garment’s lifetime.

Each garment carries a unique identifier that ties it to a specific staff member, department, and garment type. The entire workflow is then orchestrated around RFID read points at key locations throughout the laundry and distribution chain.

Quota Enforcement and Access Control at Dispensing

One of the more distinctive aspects of this deployment is how strictly quotas are enforced at the point of dispensing. Staff collect clean workwear from automated dispensing cabinets — essentially RFID-enabled vending systems for clothing. When a staff member authenticates (typically via their hospital ID card), the system checks their entitlement: how many garments of each type they are allowed to hold at any one time.

If a staff member already has their full quota of trousers, for example, the cabinet will not issue another pair until dirty items have been returned and logged. This closes the loop that previously allowed garments to accumulate in lockers or disappear entirely. It is access control applied to textile management, and it works because every transaction is recorded against the RFID identity of both the garment and the staff member.

Full Transparency of the Textile Lifecycle

Beyond dispensing, RFID read points are positioned at soiled linen collection, laundry intake, sorting, washing completion, and finished goods storage. At each stage, garments are scanned — often in bulk as entire trolleys pass through tunnel readers — and the system updates each item’s status in real time.

This means management can see, at any point, how many garments are currently on the wards, how many are in the laundry process, how many are in clean stock ready for dispensing, and crucially, how many have exceeded their expected wash cycle count and are due for retirement. Garment lifespan management reduces unnecessary waste and helps procurement plan replacement orders accurately rather than reactively.

Operational Results

Deployments of this type consistently demonstrate measurable reductions in textile loss rates — often between 20 and 40 percent — alongside reductions in total garment inventory needed to maintain adequate stock levels. When you know exactly where every item is, you do not need to overstock as a buffer against uncertainty. At Graz’s scale, even a modest percentage reduction in inventory translates to significant cost savings.

Staff experience also improves. Automated dispensing means no waiting for a linen room attendant, no disputes over who took what, and no shift starting without the right uniform. The system handles all of that transparently in the background.

Why This Model Works for Healthcare

Healthcare is a demanding environment for any tracking technology. Garments face aggressive laundering, high humidity, and frequent handling. UHF RFID tags designed for laundry applications are rated for hundreds of wash cycles at temperatures up to 90 degrees Celsius, making them genuinely suited to the environment rather than merely tolerant of it.

The compliance angle also matters in healthcare specifically. Knowing that a garment has been through a certified wash process, and being able to prove it, is increasingly relevant from an infection control and audit perspective. RFID provides that audit trail automatically.

University Hospital Graz demonstrates that at scale, RFID laundry management is not just a convenience — it is an operational necessity. The combination of UHF tagging, automated dispensing with access control, quota enforcement, and full lifecycle visibility turns what was an opaque and loss-prone process into something measurable, controllable, and efficient.

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.

ELIS is the Spanish arm of Elis SA, the French textile, hygiene and facilities services group founded in 1883 and listed on Euronext Paris under the ticker ELI. Elis reported full-year 2025 revenue of 4,796.8 million euros, up 4.9 per cent year on year including 3.8 per cent organic growth, and employs around 54,000 people in 30 countries. It has traded in Spain for roughly 45 years and runs 39 industrial laundries there, serving hospitality, healthcare, social care, retail, industry and cleanroom customers.

What LavanderTrace claims to do

LavanderTrace is LavanderCode’s RFID traceability product for textile rental and laundry operators. According to the company’s own announcement, the deployment covers four points in the garment cycle:

• Identification: every garment carries a unique RFID tag, so each item can be recognised individually rather than as part of a bulk load.
• Reception and sorting: garments arriving at the plant are registered automatically as they pass through RFID reading arches, with no manual scanning step.
• Processing and washing: the movement of each item is logged at each stage of the wash process, which LavanderCode says prevents garments being lost or diverted.
• Despatch and delivery: the system checks that each garment goes back to the customer it came from, closing the loop on traceability.

LavanderCode frames the problem in the terms textile rental operators tend to use: garments going missing, no real-time visibility of where stock sits, and the logistics overhead of getting every item back to the right customer. Its other products include the Lavander 4.0 platform, RFID reading cabinets and arches, an LED-guided garment sorting system, handheld and PDA-based readers and clothing dispensing units. The company is based at Calle Lenguas 18 in Madrid and also sells into care homes and workwear providers.

What the announcement does not say

This is a vendor announcement rather than an independently audited case study, and the claims above are LavanderCode’s. It gives no operating frequency, no tag type or supplier, no garment volumes, no plant names and no deployment dates, so none of those should be inferred. It also publishes no measured result for shrinkage, throughput or sorting accuracy.

As general industry practice rather than a stated detail of this rollout, laundry RFID tags are built to survive hundreds of industrial wash, extraction and press cycles, and are usually sewn into a seam or heat-sealed to the fabric. Reading arches and cabinets are used because they read a full cage or trolley of garments in one pass instead of item by item, which is what makes RFID economic in a plant handling large daily volumes. In textile rental, the commercial case usually rests on knowing where stock is and cutting shrinkage, since every unreturned garment is a replacement cost against a fixed rental fee.

Spanish capacity keeps growing

Elis has been investing in Spanish capacity in parallel. In 2024 it opened Elis Cleanroom Granollers near Barcelona, its third cleanroom-garment laundry in Spain, a 6 million euro investment starting at 59,000 items a week with a second-phase target of 98,000 items a week. It also put 14 million euros into a site at Illescas to add capacity along the Madrid to Toledo corridor.

More coverage of RFID asset tracking and logistics deployments is available in our category archives.

Read more at https://lavandercode.es/elis-espana-implementa-lavandertrace-para-la-trazabilidad-de-prendas

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.