Why Carter’s Tags 100% of Its Units With RFID, Mandate or Not

Carter’s tags everything it produces, not only the product headed to retailers that require it. Mike Graen calls that decision pivotal for the rest of the industry, and explains why on this episode.

Mike Graen, Principal at Collaboration, LLC, sits down with Gina Maddaloni, Senior Manager of Retail Growth Initiatives at Carter’s. She started her career at the Auburn University RFID Lab as a student and went on to own Carter’s RFID deployment across the US and Canada fleets.

Carter’s sits on both sides of this conversation. It runs its own stores and carters.com, and it supplies Walmart, Kroger, and other large retailers, which means it faced the choice most apparel suppliers face: tag what specific retailers ask for, or tag the whole line. Mike makes the case for why the second answer is the only workable one. Partial tagging turns a store into a treasure hunt for untagged product, and when associates cannot find it, the conclusion they draw is that RFID does not work. The reader is fine. The tagging is the problem. He credits Carter’s decision with giving large retailers a clean enough test environment to see what item-level RFID actually does. The rest of the conversation is how Carter’s got there: a 2018 pilot that stalled on tag economics against a $10 to $12 garment, a 2020 restart driven by omni channel, inventory accuracy sitting at about 75%, and a rollout that succeeded because store associates wanted it.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• Why partial tagging makes RFID look broken when the technology is working fine
• What Mike credits Carter’s tagging decision with unlocking for large retailers evaluating RFID
• Why the calculus differs for a company that is a retailer and a wholesale supplier at the same time
• How tag cost lands on a garment priced at $10 to $12, and why that stopped a 2018 pilot
• Why 75% inventory accuracy is standard for retailers without RFID, and what it costs when a customer is standing at the pickup counter
• The three buckets the business case rested on, and which one replaced a process every retailer dreads once a year
• Why Carter’s deliberately did not lead with the financial case when introducing RFID to store teams
• What an assistant store manager in Canada called her favorite song
• How “you never have to do a physical count here” became a recruiting line for store managers
• Where Carter’s is taking RFID next, upstream into DCs and wholesale relationships

Rather than treating RFID coverage as a compliance question answered retailer by retailer, this conversation treats it as an operating decision, one that determines whether the technology works at all in the store where it lands.

About Carter’s: Carter’s, Inc. is North America’s largest apparel company exclusively for babies and young children. Its brands include Carter’s, OshKosh B’gosh, and Skip Hop, along with Child of Mine at Walmart, Just One You at Target, and Simple Joys on Amazon. Carter’s operates its own retail stores and carters.com while supplying many of North America’s largest retailers, and is publicly traded on the NYSE under CRI.

About Collaboration, LLC: Mike Graen is a 40-year retail industry veteran with more than 22 years working on RFID at retail, advising brands and retailers on on-shelf availability, inventory accuracy, and serialized data strategy.

Learn more about Carter’s: https://www.carters.com/

Conversations On Retail

Conversations On Retail is a gathering place and resource center for retail and CPG executives, built to make it easier to stay current, discover the technologies and solutions shaping the industry, and connect with the people driving it forward.

We publish news, views, and reviews from staff editors, contributing experts, and trusted partners. Some articles are developed internally, while others are submitted by industry contributors or adapted from interviews and recorded conversations with industry leaders.