RFID for the Beauty and Personal Care Industry

Digitally transformed: Mastering beauty’s challenges

Beauty and personal care retailers and brands are facing two main challenges: To provide their customers with a seamless shopping experience by merging the digital and physical retail worlds, and to ensure supply-chain integrity. 

A new era for beauty and personal care

Beauty retail channels like pick-up-on-curb and virtual stores are proliferating. More than ever, consumers expect to buy what they want anytime, anywhere, wholly on their terms, creating a greater need for a seamless shopping experience. Beauty companies are feeling the pressure to safeguard their brands’ value, independently of the distribution channel, while also providing new ways for consumers to interact with their product in a safe and efficient way. Digitally enabled platforms like virtual try-ons are on the rise, and online shopping for beauty is quickly becoming the norm. 

The new face of the beauty industry: enabling seamless shopping and supply chain integrity

The beauty industry is going through seismic changes. From supply-chain management to inventory visibility, richer consumer experiences, and more ethical methods — technology is at the heart of this transformation. By adding a digital identity to every product, Avery Dennison’s digital ID solutions such as RFID can help brands stay relevant while still improving their bottom line.

  • Inventory accuracy: Only by creating a seamless dialog between what’s in store, what’s in the stockroom, and what’s being sold online, can brands create a better, more seamless shopping experience and fully optimize their inventory.
  • Agility: The main driver of sales in the beauty industry is variety, whether it’s in-store or online. Product demand has dramatically evolved over the years, and it has highlighted the lack of agility within brands’ supply chains. Customers are becoming agnostic to channels, and expect to be able to purchase what they want anytime, anywhere. Having a flexible supply chain enables beauty brands to quickly adapt to new circumstances and respond appropriately to unforeseen shifts in product demand. This is crucial for customer satisfaction, and has a direct effect on brand reputation and loyalty. 
  • Brand protection: In 2018, 26% of 6000 Health, Safety & Security related seizures by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were counterfeit beauty and personal care goods. The beauty gray market endangers consumers and poses a high risk to brand reputation and integrity. With the growth of e-commerce and social media, it is now easier than ever for counterfeiters to make their products available to consumers. Thanks to RFID technology, brands can track and trace every single item from point of manufacture to point of sale and beyond. This helps curb diversion, reduces profit erosion and ultimately creates a higher level of trust between consumers and brands.
  • Sustainability: It is common for beauty brands to overproduce products in order to ensure a wide selection at all times. This often leads to unwanted excess - as trends change quickly, and not all inventory is sold in time or before expiration date. The energy and raw materials expenditures to manufacture, distribute and often dispose of this excess can be very high, and comes at a cost for the planet and for brand equity too. The radical improvements in inventory management afforded by RFID enable brands to optimize their production, ultimately reducing excess and waste, improving both the bottom line and brand trust.
  • Innovation: Our beauty-ready RFID tags are specially designed to work on metal packaging and on packaging containing liquids, which means they can be quickly and reliably read in parallel. Thus, individual items can be identified not only in the dense merchandising environments typical of beauty retailers, but also at carton level, as products leave the distribution point and enter store receiving. Avery Dennison was the first RFID media supplier to offer an on-metal tag with those capabilities at a price that makes high-volume tagging feasible. Our product portfolio offers complete solutions for tagging beauty products, at the factory, distribution center and in store.
  • Consumer engagement: As online beauty sales continue to increase, brands look to diversify the way they engage with their audiences - without the need for ambassadors or middlemen. With RFID, shoppers can interact with your product in a way that goes beyond the point of sale; our atma.io connected product cloud enables brands and retailers to connect and communicate with consumers via their products. By assigning each item a “digital personality”,  brands can transform their marketing efforts, increasing customer engagement while also capturing real-time data and consumer insights for every product, from manufacturing to end-of-life.

Follow the journey with atma.io connected product cloud: Clean beauty

atma.io enables products to become direct communication channels with customers by turning them into digital platforms. With atma.io’s potential for end-to-end supply chain transparency, customers can see the full journey of a product: From the quality, origins and ethical sourcing of its ingredients, to a product’s authenticity no matter the channel it was purchased from. Post purchase, brands can engage with customers on a whole new level, enabling recycling initiatives, establishing brand trust and facilitating reorders.

 

 

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Our products & innovations

In challenging environments for beauty and personal care items, AD-163u8 inlays provide optimum read ranges. Their slender form factor and rectangular shape further contribute to their versatile use in retail-oriented applications to increase inventory accuracy, improve supply chain agility, and enhance visibility across all channels.

Meanwhile, the AD-456u8 On-Metal tag means that it’s finally possible to add RFID tags to items containing metals and liquids. These on-metal inlays make it possible to extend the benefits of RFID to cosmetics, fragrances, skincare This extends unprecedented inventory visibility down to the last item, in stores and across the entire supply chain.

For other difficult applications, Midas Flagtag® is designed for item-level tagging on diverse surfaces, especially metallic surfaces like foil packaging, combined with excellent performance. Midas Flagtag has an innovative small form factor, and its antenna uses the metal surface as part of the antenna structure to increase the performance of the tag. 

Midas Flagtag is so adaptable that it can be used to tag every item in a retail outlet, enabling an automated shopping experience with completely touchless checkout -- including for small and sometimes difficult-to-tag beauty and personal care items.This offers major benefits to the shopper, in terms of time and convenience; and to the retailer, who can focus staff on more productive tasks, improve stocktaking, and reduce shoplifting.

For more available products and solutions, you can explore our product finder here.
 

So, what does that mean in practice?

A digital supply chain makeover for global prestige beauty brand

It’s no secret that sustainability has become paramount for beauty and personal care brands and retailers and, most importantly for their customers. Often the conversation centers on the impacts of beauty packaging and the “3R’s” — reduce, recycle, reuse — and rightly so. The sourcing, production and distribution of the products themselves also consume enormous amounts of natural resources and energy . Learn more about how digital IDs can help alleviate many of these issues and boost sustainability goals.

Helping EY capture the advantages of RFID for Grupo Boticário

Tags purpose-built for beauty, deep expertise, and above-and-beyond collaboration made Avery Dennison the right partner for the beauty industry’s first RFID deployment in Brazil. Seeking end-to-end traceability across its increasingly complex supply chain, Grupo Boticário hired EY to help test RFID tagging for six months in 2018. The results reduced stockouts by 97%, decreased labor by 14%, and increased revenue.

New applications for NFC technology in the beauty industry

Existing in the digital world as well as the physical world has become integral to beauty and personal care brands. NFC offers customers an interactive experience with a brand via their technological lifeline – or just smartphone. In this interesting article on Cosmetics Business, our expert Robert Pernice shares his insights on the future and benefits of the NFC technology.

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