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.