Pimkie selected Nedap’s !D Top: a powerful, compact and fashionable overhead RFID reader, which accentuates the sense of spaciousness, and creates no visual barrier for customers to view the store’s products.
Pimkie, the renowned French fast fashion clothing brand, is present in 28 countries with 690 stores. Recently, the brand launched Fashion Factory, as an embodiment of all the enthusiasm Pimkie brings to women’s fashion. This consolidates Pimkie’s ambition to create tomorrow’s fashion together, and to offer it to their customers both in stores and online.
Customer Challenge
Pimkie is speeding up its brand repositioning on the international market by reformulating its flagship stores, making them more omni-channel oriented, smarter and closer to consumers. The restyling of Pimkie’s flagship Store in Milan is a part of this. The plan involves the design of completely open entrances with unobtrusive article surveillance systems that do not block the view on the merchandise yet emphasize the ideas of freedom and creative sharing in the “Fashion Factory”.
Nedap Solution
Pimkie selected
Nedap’s
!D Top: a powerful, compact and fashionable overhead RFID reader, which accentuates the sense of spaciousness, and creates no visual barrier for customers to view the store’s products. Six !D Tops are installed along the broad entrances of Pimkie’s flagship store and are used for RFID-based electronic article surveillance: smart antenna configuration and synchronization of all the readers ensures the highest detection level.
“We want to strengthen the concept underlying the restyling of Pimkie’s Flagship Store in Milan and better interpret our brand values in a space where the product is enhanced by a bright and open environment. The company needed a security solution with the smallest possible impact on the store’s appearance and layout, however without threatening the security and loss prevention performance” says Daniele Raffele, Pimkie’s Service & Maintenance Manager for Southern Europe.
Eliminating false alarms
By installing these RFID solutions for electronic article surveillance, which was done quickly and without any major disruption of the store’s layout, a significant shrink reduction was achieved. Thanks to its dynamic beam steering, !D Top constantly generates a dynamic series of independent beams oriented in all directions, allowing for precise tag direction detection and stray tag filtering. That makes it possible to determine whether a label is really passing the system or is just a stray tag read. Using the dynamic beam steering the !D Top also detects in which direction a RFID tag is moving, this makes it possible to reliably monitor and alarm if a Pimkie article with RFID tag is leaving the store.
Future proof
The ability to identify and track the movement of articles by using the RFID tags is also a first step towards future applications of the solution for stock management using RFID.
Out of the box solution
In addition to superior detection performance, !D Top ensures an easier and more cost-effective installation, since no major structure work is needed: the antennas, connected by a single ethernet cable and powered by power over ethernet, can be installed above false ceilings, with a VESA-mount or hanging on steel cables, which makes it easy to move them to another location whenever the store design changes. Installation and configuration of the system is also extremely simple and quick. Thanks to open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the retailer or a third party software company can integrate all the devices in a total RFID solution.