EDITORIAL Text: Jessica Säilä & Jorma Lalla / Nordic ID Editing: Carl Michener / ID BBN Images: Hanna Östman / Nordic ID
DESIGNED DELIVERED SOLD Looking back only 15 years, actually obtaining au courant haute couture was not possible for consumers. The time from design to store was long and high street fashion magazines had to settle for the leftovers of Vogue, which meant catwalk copies were never quite up to date. But this has turned around quickly, and today consumers buy outfits similar to those displayed on catwalks only months earlier. Furthermore, consumers now play an important role in the creation of upcoming trends. Transforming trends and consumer preferences into products, which then are whisked to stores, is a challenge that retailers still face. RFID offers a way to shorten the time from the designer’s pen to the store.
As stated in our last Nordic IDea magazine, we want to be the pacesetters in RFID. As our customers need to recognize the underlying trends at work in the marketplace, we too need to recognize emerging trends. For us, item level RFID and the different solutions related to it are clearly no longer simply a trend, but an ongoing process of which a growing number of Nordic ID customers recognize the benefits, and thus are already deploying it. Nordic ID RFID products, which have been rated the best in the world, benefit from the company’s strong knowledge and experience in RF design. Our crew has their heart set on providing customers with the best solution, and in the case of RFID we have placed special emphasis on
optimizing device performance and battery lifetime. Our strong relationship with VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland) and leading technical universities helps us to broaden its knowledge base further. Choosing Fashion and Lifestyle industries as our theme in this Nordic IDea was an easy choice. Where the fashion industry especially was not high tech, not low tech, but rather NO TECH, the wheel has turned— and completely so. As lifestyle and fashion industries recognize the benefits of mobile technology and RFID, they have now moved from followers to the leaders in mobile auto ID. The benefits of RFID reported by our customers are amazing—in fact nearly unbelievable. They include among others cost savings on the order of reducing stock-taking time from 240 days to 2 hours, and design-to-store times almost halved from 15 to 8 weeks. These are groundbreaking benefits and Nordic ID does its very best to match them. We as a company pride ourselves in being fastest in the industry to fill orders for mobile RFID devices. Our aim is to help our customers grow. Reducing out of stocks, making trends a reality for consumer more quickly and encouraging additional purchases are an important part on a retailer’s path to further growth. To answer this need, Nordic ID will continue to develop its current RFID portfolio, as well as to introduce new RFID products to the Retail Technology Marketplace. Jorma Lalla, CEO, Nordic ID Jessica Säilä, Business Development Director, Nordic ID
2 • Nordic IDea