What changes can RFID tags bring to the fashion industry

RFID tags have led some local apparel companies to develop a series of tens of millions of practices around it. They want to make full use of its value from the supply chain to the retail end.

Shanghai, China-China's local apparel group Ribo Fashion recently replaced their clothes with new tags. Although these tags are three or four times more expensive than the original, they think it is a cost-effective "environmental" business. The key is the RFID tag hidden on the tag. These tags don’t look amazing, but they can actually play a huge role in warehousing logistics, retail feedback, design and production, which can help brands greatly improve warehousing logistics efficiency and clothing inventory backlog problems. Hidden style.

For a long time, inventory backlog and waste have been the most criticized issues in the fashion and luxury goods industry. In 2018, Burberry burned 250 million yuan worth of inventory with a fire, and the irony words such as "I would rather burn it than give you" immediately walked between the large and small media. This fire has deeply branded the industry's extravagant and wasteful image in the hearts of the general public, and it has also urged the garment industry's persistent pursuit of sustainable development in the past two years. On the other hand, according to public data, as of the first half of 2018, the Swedish fast fashion brand H&M has a backlog of up to 36.333 billion SEK (about 4 billion US dollars), an increase of 13% year-on-year, which is equivalent to 31.9% of the brand's sales %. Nowadays, the sales of the entire fashion industry are gradually slowing down, and the profit risk caused by the inventory backlog is increasing.

Brands also urgently need to change this "non-environmental protection" status, which not only severely damages their own image, but also makes them carry heavy operating costs.

然而,的问题inventory backlog cannot simply be attributed to the fact that brands cannot sell goods. In fact, every link in the entire industry chain is unconsciously creating the risk of inventory backlog. From inventory to warehousing to sorting logistics, from retail feedback to volume production, human errors in every link are leading brands to misjudge output and inventory.

To this end, the clothing industry has been drawing on automation technology to improve its efficiency and accuracy. Among them, the large-scale application of radio frequency identification technology in the foreign apparel industry has allowed them to taste the dividends of technology.

This technology has been widely used in supermarkets and automobile manufacturing. It is also known as the wireless version of the bar code. The entire RFID system is composed of electronic tags, antennas and readers. Its operating mechanism is to use a clothing tag as a carrier to attach an RFID electronic tag to the tag. The electronic tag can send information stored in its chip or send a signal of a certain frequency, which is then accepted by the reader and passed to the data management system , Make corresponding processing and control for different settings. In other words, it uses a series of point-to-point automated operations to counteract possible errors caused by manual operations.

近年来,国内服装行业have also begun to widely apply this technology to the supply chain. According to Xinhua News Agency’s previous report, Hailan House was the first domestic large-scale apparel company to adopt RFID. At that time, it applied this technology to warehousing and transportation, which greatly improved the efficiency and accuracy of its assembly line. Ribo Group now divides the entire RFID project into three phases, and launches practical applications in turn for the three links of warehousing logistics, physical operations, consumer profiles and consumption trend prediction.

After a period of practice, they found that from warehousing and sorting to final delivery, the RFID system specifically increased the efficiency of these warehouse logistics links by 4 to 6 times, and after the review link, the accuracy rate can approach 100%. "If a customer wants 100 pieces of clothing, it was manually picked 100 times before, and now it's finished once," said Lin Liang, director and deputy general manager of Ribo Group. "There is still a need for human presence in the entire link, what they have to do It’s something the machine can’t do, such as keeping the tag face up or putting clothes on the sorting equipment, but the amount of labor (compared to the previous one) is very different.”

尽管poi的RFID标签只代表一个数据nt from the information point of view, this data point can have many application scenarios. Earlier Hailan House said that the technology will be applied to the retail link in the future, and now the daily broadcast also wants to extend to smart retail. Specifically, the previously hidden consumer data is presented in a visual way, and the production and design ends are re-planned based on the feedback of these data to achieve the purpose of controlling inventory and precise production.

Nippon Broadcasting Group’s auxiliary materials partner, Esquel Group, is responsible for the planning and execution of the entire RFID project. It has also independently developed a Pangu system “out of the circle” to integrate data from all ports for the brand and analyze its orientation. The group introduced to BoF that the focus of the second-phase project of Ribo Group was on physical operations, mainly for store inventory, display and fitting. Generally speaking, it is unrealistic for branded physical stores to want to inventory once a day, but with the help of RFID, the inventory time can be greatly shortened and the inventory efficiency can be improved. In addition, the RFID point-to-point reading and identification can help the goods to be placed in time, "just like a GPS, the clerk can view the location of a certain product display in real time."

At the same time, brands are also eager to understand the frequency of products being tried on and the interaction between consumers and products. "Whether the consumer picked it up and looked down and put it down, or went in and tried it on, but didn't feel good looking and didn't want to buy it. The meaning of these two behaviors is quite different. We used to only get the final sales data, but we now think Know what exactly a piece of clothing has experienced in the store," said Wang Weiping, general manager of the brand division of Ribo Group. "When these consumer behaviors have more concentrated and precise feedback, we can guess or analyze the product to increase production. Is it a reduction in production? Is the design incorrect or is there a problem with the version?"

Cui Qin, managing director of accessories and packaging at Esquel Group, said that many possibilities only come out at the planning stage, not the functions inherent in RFID technology. "For example, the consumer behaviors required by the Nippon Broadcasting Group cannot be directly read by traditional RFID readers. But when they had this idea, we went to find corresponding solutions before thinking that RFID tags can actually work with cameras . "Through the camera to identify consumer actions, combined with the product data corresponding to RFID, the brand can obtain the interactive relationship between the consumer and a certain product, and then further subdivide the market response of a certain product.

The possibility of the extension of RFID technology can also satisfy more curiosity of the brand. The three-phase plan of Ribo Group is to incorporate face recognition technology and AI big data, with the precise direction of RFID to achieve a more magnificent retail solution. For regular customers of the brand, Nibo intends to use face recognition and import all of its consumer interactions to establish its personal consumption habits and preference files. With the help of AI big data, I hope to analyze and even predict consumption trends and consumption habits. Lin Liang said: "It can be understood that all the purposes are to understand consumers better and achieve accurate production."

It's just that when a technology is quite mature, there is relatively little room for creativity. Cui Qin told BoF: "This RFID has been born for decades, and its own technology has reached the upper limit, and the derivative system we made for it is certainly not a giant system. However, with the human technology itself Development, it has the opportunity to combine and match with various future technologies to achieve more solutions."

However, to achieve such a large-scale application, the cost of clothing group investment is naturally high. From updating RFID storage and sorting equipment to applying Pangu system, Ribo Group has invested tens of millions. In the future, if face recognition and other technologies are widely used in various physical stores, it is bound to invest more. In addition, as a technology component, the previous RFID tags have been chemically etched, and the group also used degradable ECO RFID tags this time. Yu Dejun, president of Stora Enso China, the supplier of the environmental label, said that in comparison, ECO RFID can reduce carbon emissions by 40%. However, the cost of producing the label every year will be several million more.

Whether it is to control production or environmental protection, the huge cost investment and the insignificant rate of return are the reasons why some companies are discouraged. Lin Liang believes, "Brands should be seen in the long run. After applying RFID technology to achieve accurate production, you can spend a lot of unnecessary production costs every year, and reducing the backlog of inventory is already the largest environmental protection behavior. It can be said that it is self-interest. Altruistic."

At present, only a few domestic clothing giants are very enthusiastic about adopting RFID technology. Although large domestic apparel companies have some hindsight on this technology, Lin Liang said that as the country’s environmental protection requirements increase, most apparel companies are also raising awareness of sustainable development. "Enterprises may wait and see It will take a long time to start acting, and the way of acting may not be limited to the use of RFID, but companies that never realize that they are not acting can only say that they are relatively rare and relatively different."