Choate Alumni Lead American Apparel In New Direction Company Employs Merchandise Tracking System
By Adrian Lui ’10
News Reporter
Recently, Choate alumnus and American Apparel Chief Executive Officer Dov Charney recruited an old classmate, Zander Livingston, to place radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on American Apparel clothing. The RFID tags would track and manage every item sold. Livingston, now the American Apparel RFID technology director, implemented this plan recently. In seventeen stores in New York, close to forty thousand items per store have been tagged with these chips.
RFID is an automatic identification method that retrieves data using radio waves. The tags can be put on merchandise, animals, and even people. To manage the information collected from the RFIDs, which are supplied by Motorola, Inc., American Apparel plans to utilize Vue Technology’s TrueVue software. Once the RFID antenna captures the data, a corporation called Avery Dennison will then locate and store that data. The Los Angeles-based American Apparel is planning to launch this sophisticated inventory tracking system in an additional 120 stores in North America.
Students at Choate are more concerned with their privacy than with the new tagging system. They worry that the tags will still function after they purchase the clothing or that they will even have the ability to track the location of the wearer. “If it’s inside the store, it’s okay because they can keep track of their merchandise—but only if the RFIDs function inside the stores,” says Marco Walton ’10. Matt Chang ’10 notes that the idea of having tracking tags on your shirt is a “creepy invasion of privacy” and could make customers feel uneasy, even if the store ensures that tags will shut down after purchase.
Attaching the RFIDs to the merchandise is no small feat. Livingston says that the RFID tagging process has not been automated yet. Tagging a single store’s merchandise by hand takes about three days if several employees are working on the clothing. Despite the arduous workload, Livingston believes that the RFID system should work well for American Apparel, because it sells the same items of clothing in many different colors.
“So basically, as soon as an item has been taken off the rack to be tried on, or purchased or just carried around the store as the customer is browsing, the item is no longer available. We also have a lot of items that look similar to each other, and because of that, a lot of items get misplaced,” Livingston says. “The high sales volume often means that more than one thousand items are moving back and forth between stockrooms and salesrooms per day.”
Ten percent of American Apparel’s produced merchandise is never sold because it never leaves the stockroom. Livingston was hired by Dov Charney to reduce this percentage; the long-term goal is to have American Apparel stores selling all of their clothes. Before American Apparel’s clothing was tagged with RFIDs, employees had to keep track of the number of items on the sales floor and in storage rooms manually. Clothing counts were not always accurate, and employees had to work long hours to ensure that this job was carried out.
By using the RFIDs, American Apparel expects to both increase sales and customer service and enhance the inter-store clothing transfer process. This process balances clothing stock between stores, notes Tom Racette, Director of RFID Market Development for Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility Division. The RFIDs will also be able to illustrate purchasing trends.
The RFID system is an investment. Livingston refused to specify the exact cost, but noted that it was equivalent to employing two full-time workers for a year. Livingston is currently looking into creating a faster tagging system to cut costs even more.
Chief Executive of American Apparel and Alumnus, Dov Cherney contacts an old classmate for help. PHOTO/contributed
