Early Adoption and Growth
As early as 2000, Walmart began using RFID in retail scenarios. Later, Decathlon established an RFID company in 2010; Zara parent company Inditex.
In 2014, it was decided that the entire group would adopt RFID technology. Then, RFID began to be widely used in the fields of shoes and clothing and supermarket retail.
According to McKinsey's survey of retail companies, the application of RFID products in shoe and clothing and supermarket retail in European and American countries is growing very rapidly. 73% of retailers are already using or preparing to use RFID technology.
From a technical perspective, the development of RFID technology has now entered a mature stage, and has begun to be widely used in countries such as Europe and the United States. However, looking back at China, according to offline research by analysts at the AIoT Star Map Research Institute, the current penetration rate of RFID products in China is about 15%, and most of the shoe and clothing brands that apply RFID are overseas brands. To sum up, as the product matures, the market with low penetration rate will develop more rapidly, so there is still a lot of room for the development of RFID in the domestic market.
Market Segments and Applications
The field of footwear and clothing and supermarket retail can be subdivided into four major parts: clothing, shoes and bags, supermarkets, hardware products, and food and drugs. Here is a brief introduction to the application of these three parts.
The field of clothing, shoes and bags is already a very mature field for RFID applications. Currently in developed countries such as Europe and the United States, the application of RFID has become very common. For developing countries such as China, due to low labor costs, manual inventory or QR code inventory are currently the main product management methods. From the offline survey data of AIOT Star Map Research Institute, it can be concluded that the types of stores that currently use RFID the most are fast-moving consumer goods and sports brands, such as ADIDAS, NIKE, UNIQLO, MUJI, H&M, UR, etc. In addition, some small emerging brands, as well as independent designer brands, have also begun to use RFID to manage their clothing, shoe and bag products.
In the field of hardware products, the use of electronic price tags to display product prices has become an obvious trend in first- and second-tier cities. However, RFID can complement electronic price tags and bring a relatively large improvement to its inventory turnover efficiency. This area does not yet have a large number of applications, but it is an application area that many RFID industry insiders are paying attention to. Moreover, in the 3C field, especially mobile phones, there are also expectations to use NFC for management. At present, many foreign countries are already studying and exploring the implementation of this area.
In the field of food and drugs, some overseas brands have begun to try to introduce RFID into the food and drug industry. Companies such as Red Bull, Rite Aid, and San Daniele are already deploying some products. For this field, in addition to basic functions such as rapid inventory and item tracking, RFID has more needs focused on anti-counterfeiting traceability and shelf life management of food and drugs.
RFID Label Types and Applications
Currently, five types of labels are mainly used in the field of shoes, clothing and supermarket retail: paper labels, ribbon labels, hangtag labels (woven label), anti-metal labels, and hard shell labels. Here is a brief introduction to the characteristics of these five labels and their main application products.
Benefits of RFID in Retail
In retail scenarios, RFID mainly plays functions such as improving circulation efficiency, product inventory, smart fitting rooms, finding remaining goods, fast checkout, out-of-stock alarms, anti-theft and loss prevention, passenger flow analysis, product anti-counterfeiting, supply chain management, etc., providing retail Escort the cost reduction and efficiency increase of enterprises.
Challenges and Solutions for Clothing Brands
Currently, many clothing brands are facing challenges such as low supply chain efficiency, rising labor costs, and unclear market trends. Faced with large-scale collection and delivery, returns, inventory, and sorting tasks, the management model using barcode recognition technology is time-consuming and labor-intensive. , fee for venue. UHF RFID technology can precisely improve these problems and realize automated production, warehousing and logistics management, brand management, and channel management, bringing management convenience to the clothing industry.
