Today’s apparel manufacturers know all too well how globalization affects the economics of supply and demand. It seems that the world is getting smaller, and your product margins are shrinking right along with it.

The competitive nature of apparel manufacturing leads to a constant balancing act between maintaining quality, increasing speed to market, and reducing costs. For one MSM Solutions customer, the key to tipping the scales in their favor was a simple process change that netted significant savings.

Like many manufacturers, the customer was using a barcode generator to tag each apparel item with a barcode label, as well as creating a label encoded with the product EPC code for each item. As a result, they were printing duplicate product labels for every item – a total of 400 million labels per year.

PortalTrack Eliminates Need for Duplicate Product Labels

With the help of MSM Solutions’ PortalTrack RFID system, the manufacturer consolidated standard barcode labeling with RFID EPC encoding on one brand label, eliminating the supplemental hangtag. The savings for their retailer customer was more than $1M in label costs.

MSM Solutions delivers scalable, customizable EPC compliant solutions that have been deployed by some of the world’s largest apparel manufacturers. In addition to saving money, the consolidation of EPC and barcode information on one integrated tag allows brand owners to have full control over the print quality and design, ensuring a high-quality look and feel to match their brand image.

So this leads us to the next logical question: How and where should the integrated brand label be printed? In our next blog installment, we’ll look at the pros and cons of printing retail hangtags in-house versus a third-party supplier.