The company set out how the system works to the Argentine polo publication Prensa Polo in an article published on 2 November 2026. Logi Polo S.A. describes itself as a factory of polo mallets and accessories for the player and the horse, and employs a team of around 20 people. Prensa Polo put its founding at 1978 in a separate profile published in October 2026, and the name joins the Lopez and Gimenez family surnames.

It is the kind of deployment that rarely gets written up. This is not a retailer counting stock on a shop floor or a logistics operator reading pallets through a dock door. It is a 20-person bench shop tracking handmade goods, where the unit of work is a single bespoke item rather than a carton or a pallet.

Each chip holds the mallet’s specification and a record of the work carried out on it. Because every station has a computer with a reader attached, each interaction is recorded as it happens, which gives the team a live view of the floor. “This lets us know which section each [mallet] is in, what stages it has yet to complete, and how long it’s been in production,” said Bauti Lopez Fuentes, who started the project.

Lopez Fuentes said the system took four years to develop, and that it was built to improve the firm’s organisation across new mallet production, repairs, shop stock and administration rather than for any one of those alone.

The second thing the chip produces is a provenance record, and it comes almost free. Because the data follows the mallet rather than the order paperwork, Logi Polo can look up which batch of cane a given mallet came from, when it was made, and every repair it has had since. For a product that comes back to the workshop for repair over years of play, a per-item service history is worth considerably more than a batch number on a label.

Tracking work in progress is a harder problem in a craft shop than the volume figures suggest. Logi Polo’s output is bespoke, specified to the individual player from the grip style and its dimensions through to the colours, and the sport’s current preference is for lighter and more flexible mallets that reduce strain on the arm and hand without losing response at the strike. Material lead times are long as well. The wood for the heads comes from northern Argentina and is aged for at least two and a half years, with some batches held for four or five, while cane is aged for six to eight months before it is selected. The company has travelled to Singapore and Malaysia to choose cane since 1989, and added Indonesia as a source in 2013.

Selection is done by Marcelo Lopez and his son Bautista. “The first and most important thing is that it’s sound,” Marcelo said of choosing cane. “Second, that it has good balance, and third, that it’s aesthetically pleasing.” On who the shop builds for, he added: “For us, all clients are equal. It doesn’t matter if they are a beginner or a ten-goal player.”

What Logi Polo has not said is anything about the tag itself. The Prensa Polo article gives no frequency, no tag type, no indication of how the chip is fixed to a mallet without affecting its weight or balance, and no vendor for either the hardware or the software. Nor does it say how many mallets a year pass through the system. The company’s stated plan to let customers read a mallet’s record on a phone would point towards NFC, since that is the band an ordinary handset can read without an accessory, but that is an inference and Logi Polo has not confirmed it. The differences between the bands are set out in our RFID glossary.

That customer-facing step is still ahead. For now the system is internal only. The plan is for owners to pull up the full specification of their own mallet, including its weight, the type of cane in the shaft and the characteristics of the grip. Other deployments of this kind are collected in our asset tracking coverage.

Read more at https://prensapolo.com/en/2026/11/02/logi-polo-tacos/

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.