G-Star RAW,  a designer clothing company with 400 stores globally, and its North American franchisee Denimwall Inc. are reaching new heights with RFID technology. Denimwall, owner of the Union Square store in New York City and six other locations, was looking for a hassle-free end-to-end solution for article visibility to establish a high level of stock accuracy, offer best in class product availability and the best possible shopping experience for customers, and to prepare for omni-channel retail.

The integrated RAIN RFID solution chosen by G-Star RAW utilizes the Impinj platform including ItemSense software and xArray gateways for “hands-free” infrastructure, and delivers item-level visibility and in-store analytics with Detego InStore and RIoT mobile apps. Denimwall can automatically collect data about merchandise, providing accurate inventory information and real-time transparency – all hands-free, without human intervention. Based on perpetual inventory feeds, out-of-stock situations are automatically detected and mitigated by means of an optimized replenishment process leading to a consistently high on-floor availability.

The real-time, item-level transparency also enables Denimwall to better fulfill orders for click and collect. Manual administrative processes are reduced to a minimum, giving sales personnel the time to engage with the customer in order to provide an improved customer experience. Based on RIoTs deep fashion retail and retail systems experience coupled with Detego’s software suite for business intelligence, the solution was deployed in a very short time frame. The fast implementation and deployment was underpinned by a lean and agile approach to immediately realize the aimed business benefits for Denimwall Inc.

“Our primary objective was to significantly increase inventory accuracy to enable an exceptional in-store omni-channel customer experience,” says Craig Leonard, Denimwall CEO. “Our goal was to automatically achieve 98%+ item level accuracy and we are achieving that and more. The increased accuracy has also other major benefits including significantly improving our on-shelf product availability by empowering our brand ambassadors with a BYOD smartphone app advising them in real-time of items needing replenishment; alerting them to potential theft, enabling them to scan an item and pull up live in-store availability and more. Another impressive benefit has been significantly faster POS checkout.”

Shayni Rae, Denimwall, Director Store Operations, says that retailer now has the ability to remotely monitor sales floor replenishment time and loss prevention performance across its network of stores. “The benefits of the store pilot have exceeded our expectations and we are now looking to expand it to our other locations,” says Leonard.