News

Apparel retailer adds item-level garment tracking

August 6, 2008

MORGAN HILL, Calif. — Alien Technology Corp., provider of RFID products and services, and systems integrator STS Technology recently implemented a garment tracking system for LCWaikiki in Istanbul, Turkey. With more than 190 stores nationwide, LCWaikiki is one of Turkey's fastest growing apparel retailers.

The team installed a garment tagging project at LCWaikiki's flagship store in downtown Istanbul. STS used an RFID/EAS (electronic article surveillance) combo hard tag on each of the 24,000 articles of clothing LCWaikiki sells for men, women and children.

Every unique article of clothing at LCWaikiki's flagship store is tagged with a single hard tag that encases both an EAS anti-theft sensor and an Alien UHF/EPC compliant Gen 2 Squiggle-Short inlay. The RFID portion of the tag enables LCWaikiki to track all processes from stock receipts, stockroom/sales replenishment, inventory management, product detection, customer returns, stock taking and store-to-store transfers.

"We have noticed that using different vendors for tags and readers can lead to a lack of accountability in the application's success. It was very important to us that one vendor guarantee the complete solution by providing both readers and tags," said Levent Yalcinkaya, spokesperson for STS. "We chose the Alien solution because Alien's hardware out-performs all other readers and tags in the marketplace today."

As a result of its RFID deployment, LCWaikiki has seen a 60 percent time reduction in stock taking and a 70 percent time savings in the transfer of stock from the storeroom to the sales area.