American Apparel’s growth is explosive. It has more than 300 stores around the world and their retail sales are enormous. American Apparel has expanded product range, improved systems and supply chain management. Their retail stores are also designed to improve productivity of the store to help increase sales and employees to work faster.
American Apparel is a store ran in a Boutique style model with only one size available for each style of clothing. Therefore the speed of replenishment is critical. They also offer more items per square meter store space. However, employees find it very difficult to manage the store on busy days since only one size is available per item.
Due to this problem in many retail stores, the RFID system is introduced. It finds lost sales items that are not on the sales floor and recognize what needs to be replenished. The RFID system is a reader of tags, and also allows in store inventory tracking system.
This RFID system speeds up point of sales, increases the efficiency of replenishing correct items onto the sales floor because right after the point of sale, the RFDI systems informs the back stock what size and product is need to be replenished and then it will quickly update the sales floor. This allows the employees to interact with customers more, improving the brand image.
The American Apparel stores that have the RFID system implemented experiences a 14% increase in sales than a normal AA store without the RFID sales.
More details as to how the RFID system works:
