Your fashionable clientele is demanding as well as time conscious. Keeping the showroom perfect, with the right product in the right place with maximum consistency, is not only a priority for you—it is a challenge that directly impacts your bottom line.
Merchandise that “isn’t there” when the customer is ready to buy is an expensive problem for any retailer, but for designer boutiques and ultra-luxury department stores, the cost is especially steep. A single missing item can mean hundreds of dollars in unrealized revenue, plus the risk of losing credibility and loyalty with a valued customer.
Statistically, 18 out of every 100 customers depart a store empty-handed and dissatisfied, primarily because merchandise isn’t available. Most (73%) will go to a competing retailer. And take note: one in four shoppers say they are willing to pay more to get what they want,
Globally, Out-of-Stocks cost retailers an estimated $456.3 billion each year, accounting for 42% of lost sales industry-wide. And, this is merely one piece of the larger, over-arching problem of inventory distortion, an $800 billion a year elephant in the retail back room.
With each new deployment, RFID consistently demonstrates its unprecedented ability to tame this elephant with real-time inventory visibility throughout the supply chain. RFID’s powerful capabilities deliver actionable data that at 99+% accuracy is nearly perfect. As a retailer managing expensive fashion lines, imagine how such error-free visibility could drive benefits across your entire operation.
Beyond reducing Out-of-Stocks by 60-80%–and thereby increasing selling opportunities for your staff— having total clarity for what merchandise is on hand and where it is located will potentially boost sales and profit margins by enabling immediate replenishment and faster sell-through. Accurate inventory data also means that you will be doing less discounting with more precise reordering and forecasting.
These are the most basic functions of RFID, providing a solid foundation for retail excellence and happier, more satisfied customers. We can detail other functions important to the high fashion retailer’s bottom line, including helping to reduce shrink, mitigating retail fraud, derailing brand counterfeiters and enabling a highly efficient cross-channel sales strategy, but will save these for future blogs.
With so many compelling reasons to deploy RFID now, what are you waiting for? For many high-fashion retailers, one obstacle to the immediate roll-out of RFID is fear of disruption. In response, Truecount developed Fingertip® RFID, the first complete, enterprise handheld RFID hosted in the Cloud. We launched Fingertip in April, 2014, and it has proven its power. You can depend on Fingertip to deliver the near perfect accuracy and total visibility required for a “perfect retail experience” without effort and with no disruption to the smooth flow of business or to the look and ambiance of your showroom floor.
Because you care about your customers, we think you will appreciate how easily Fingertip tags up and deploys. It fact, deployment has so little impact, it is almost imperceptible. The sales tag is the RFID tag, keeping everything simple and unobtrusive, as well as pleasing to the eye of your most discerning customers.
With its sophisticated capabilities, RFID is about to become the primary method of inventory counting and tracking. Over the next five years, I’m convinced that we will finally see the entire retail industry focus on RFID as a strategy for enhancing the consumer experience rather than as a game-changing “technology”. The implications are massive, and while the future won’t come all at once for the industry, we are moving on an exciting path toward reimagining retail. If you are ready to be part of that future now, contact Truecount at success@truecount.com.