RFID Helps Lord & Taylor Capture More Sales

With window shopping, if something interesting is in the window – and you like it – it will pull you into the store.

The same goes for shoes – if a great pair is on the display table and you see them, you want to try them on. And then you just might be walking out with a new pair of shoes and a smile on your face.

But what if the product never sees the light of day? What if instead of catching your eye on a display, a great pair of shoes is somewhere in the big stockroom of shoes in the back, lonely and waiting to be brought out for all to see?

This is a costly real-time issue for department and shoe stores alike. The current process for validating shoe display compliance is slow, dated, messy, and let’s face it, not that fun or engaging for the associate.

“We’re not only saving tremendous amounts of time in doing an inventory, but we’re able to do it more often and have it be more specific so that our efforts in restocking are more focused.”Rosemary Ryan, Regional Operations Director, Region One, Lord & Taylor

What happens if an RFID-enabled tag is placed on the bottom of a shoe? Then a leading-edge handheld is waved over the tops of the toes of the shoes on display? Forty-five minutes later a “missing sample” report can be created, which in turn can be executed by store associates.

This allows the store to have displays fully stocked with all the styles, sizes, and colors before the store even opens. They can now do this every day, even on weekends! This is exactly what Lord & Taylor has been able to do with RFID.

Customers in a store can’t shop the stockroom, only the sales floor, so maintaining samples should be a number one priority. RFID technology can maximize the shopping experience.

In Lord & Taylor’s flagship Fifth Avenue store in New York, thousands of different styles and colors of shoes are on display every day. This used to mean a complete display inventory required associates to physically touch every shoe to capture its bar code, so compliancy could only be performed weekly.

Sales associates now use RFID to automatically improve display sample inventory processes and visibility, and can attribute a 4% increase in sales to more complete floor displays.