Fashion Company Doubles Logistics Efficiency With RFID

Patrizia Pepe, a fashion brand of Tessilform Spa that was established in 1998, has a presence throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. With collections for women, men, and young girls, Patrizia Pepe offers a complete fashion look including a wide range of accessories, from shoes to bags and jewelry. The company sells its clothing lines through a network of retailers, as well as in its own stores.

Tessilform runs the Patrizia Pepe brand with a business concept that provides both traditionally scheduled collections, as well as smaller, weekly collections that provide retailers with constantly fresh stock. They support this business approach with a flexible design, production and distribution system run from their Florence headquarters.

Initial work during the pilot phase included choosing where to locate the RFID tag, as well as what information to write. In Patrizia Pepe's case, they decided to include the EAN 13 (a barcode standard that originated in Europe, but is defined by GS1 standards organization as a superset of the United States Universal Product Code), country of production information, and the production order. They located the RFID tag behind the barcode on their brand label, so they could encode the RFID tag information simultaneously with the barcode printing. Currently, they use two types of label, a 64 x 34 cm and a 37 x 14 cm format. Both of these use Impinj Monza tag chips.