Avery Dennison Introduces Multiple RFID Solutions for Retailers and Brands

Avery Dennison Retail Branding and Information Solutions (RBIS) announced a newly expanded RFID portfolio that creates high performance, cost efficient solutions for targeted product categories (fragrances, jewelry, cosmetics, accessories, housewares) and improved durability, flexibility, speed and graphic capabilities for all categories, including apparel and footwear.

Avery Dennison has worked with industry-leading partners, including NXP, Impinj, and EM Marin to deliver the most versatile and high-performance RFID solutions available on the market today, addressing applications that have traditionally been hard to serve, and dramatically enhancing the creative options for RFID graphic tag designers to meet the demands of the global marketplace.

The new solutions were announced at RFID Journal Live:
• Avery Dennison makes RFID tagging on metals and liquids easy: Many retailers struggle with the challenge of RFID tagging products containing metal or liquid, such as housewares, cosmetics, lotions, fragrances and other items using metal foil in the packaging. Retailers have wanted to achieve the inventory accuracy and loss prevention benefits of RFID for these items, but these materials/surfaces interfere with the radio frequencies the RFID reader and tag use to communicate. However, Avery Dennison has made RFID tagging these notoriously difficult products easy with the patent-pending AD-451m5 label that uses the Impinj Monza 5 IC RFID.
• Avery Dennison delivers faster, performance-driven and versatile RFID tagging: For RFID applications that demand fast encoding, global versatility and best-in-class readability, Avery Dennison has partnered with NXP to deliver two new inlays to its UHF RFID portfolio, the AD-235u7 and the AD-370u7. The inlays feature the latest gGen2 IC from NXP, the UCODE7, which delivers high performance across all global markets. Avery Dennison is the first company to bring the chip to market. The UCODE7-enabled inlays are able to program 100 items in milliseconds, enabling high-speed production of RFID tags and labels. Inventory management is further improved due to higher inlay sensitivity that allows all tags to be read from a greater distance.
• Avery Dennison delivers breakthrough RFID digital printing solution which improves graphic capability and flexibility: As retailers have integrated RFID into their existing graphic tags, they have faced creative compromises with the limitations of printed RFID tags. The new solution offers the capability to print high quality graphic images and high-density variable information on UHF RFID integrated tags. This breakthrough utilizes Avery Dennison Smart Face technology, which delivers a superior printing surface without the multiple layers found in some competitor tags, combined with excellent graphic quality delivered through Avery Dennison’s extensive digital printing capabilities. This enables apparel retailers to eliminate separate RFID tags and labels and integrate RFID technology into their existing graphic tags. To date, Avery Dennison has delivered over 700 million Smart Face tags and labels to the market over three years.
• Avery Dennison improves RFID label durability: For RFID applications that require elevated levels of durability including harsher environments in high-impact situations, Avery Dennison has partnered with EM Marin to expand its current RFID solutions portfolio to address customer durability needs with three new inlays, the AD-234eM, AD-382eM and AD-319eM, which include EM 4124 IC chip technology. These new inlays are the ideal solution for printed fabric labels that are sewn into a garment at the very beginning of the manufacturing process, securely attaching the label so that the garments can be tracked from source, through the distribution center, to the store floor and final check-out process, ensuring enhanced inventory accuracy and loss prevention throughout the global apparel supply chain.

“Working in tandem with our partners, we’ve leveraged our innovation capabilities and technologies to create solutions that help retailers and brands improve their performance with RFID,” said Mark Hill, vice president and general manager, global innovation and solutions development, Avery Dennison. “We are excited to deliver the benefits of RFID to a rapidly increasing range of supply chain and creative applications across multiple industries.”

“Avery Dennison is driven to constantly innovate in the RFID market. We lead the industry with our deep experience, proven by our production of more than two billion RFID tags for our global customer base,” said Deon Stander, vice president and general manager, global commercial, Avery Dennison RBIS. “These new solutions are the perfect complement to our portfolio of retail technology solutions and make it easier, faster and more cost-effective to implement RFID programs that maximize ROI.”

The apparel industry is adopting RFID technology at a faster rate than other industries, with Avery Dennison RFID inlays being widely used by global apparel brands and retailers including Marks & Spencer, Macy’s, Gerry Weber and CentrObuv. UHF/HF/NFC RFID Item‐level marking solutions provide retailers with benefits ranging from improved inventory productivity, labor efficiency and loss prevention while enhancing the customer’s retail experience through the use of new interactive applications that make retail transactions simpler and more convenient.

RFID provides a multitude of benefits throughout the supply chain; While a typical retail stock level can be anywhere from 65% to 80% accurate, item‐level RFID technology allows a retail associate to take a complete store inventory in just a few hours, yielding approximately 99% or more inventory accuracy. In addition, RFID provides visibility into nearly 100% of incoming shipments vs. the 10% inspection typical at many DCs today, allowing retailers to identify and address discrepancies between what was ordered and what was received.