RFID technology has many applications – many to date stymied by the relatively high unit cost of the tags.

RFID tags can be applied to everything from music festivals to eco-grave tracking to the feeding of cats and the location of missing children in shopping malls.

But trend watching website Springwise.com reports on a Brazilian fashion store MeMove, where RFID tags were recently installed to track and control inventory throughout the entire supply chain.

MeMove’s clothing manufacturers in Brazil, China and elsewhere begin by sewing an EPC Gen 2 passive RFID label into each item, according to a report in RFID Journal.

With that in place, items are carefully tracked as they make their way to the distribution center and then the store, their arrival at which automatically updates the store’s inventory system.

Each store has an RFID-enabled trolley that need only be rolled through the aisles to update inventory in minutes. Dressing rooms are connected as well so as to track how many items enter and leave each stall, potentially cutting down on shrinkage.

Shoppers, meanwhile, can check themselves out securely by placing all their items in a dedicated RFID-enabled basket, which calculates the total price. Once the customer has paid by debit or credit card at the POS terminal, the basket automatically updates inventory and erases each RFID label’s encoded ID number so that alarms won’t sound as the shopper exits the store.

In the event the consumer later returns an item, RFID codes can be reprogrammed — but only if the tag hasn’t yet been washed. If it has, the tag can’t be re-encoded and the store refuses the return.

Launched last October, the RFID project at MeMove has reportedly proven so successful that VGB Global Brands, the brand’s parent company, now plans to deploy it in its Siberian and Crawford chains as well. Retailers around the globe: food for thought?

Website: www.memove.com.br