Empowering “New Retail” With Cloud-based Labeling

For apparel retailers, having the right digital tools is key to keeping up with a rapidly evolving industry. The global pandemic has drastically shifted shopping habits and customer expectations, causing the retail space to become more omnichannel focused, and putting a greater emphasis on efficiency, flexibility, and traceability.  

As drivers of the ticketing and tagging process, labeling solutions are what bring manufacturers, retailers, and consumers onto the same page. Sometimes overlooked, these solutions provide companies with greater access to stronger technology and capabilities, giving them agility and improving time to market.  

Let’s look at four industry trends that are driving retailers to adopt cloud-based Enterprise Labeling to make themselves more resilient and responsive in a volatile market. 

#1 Ticketing is happening closer to the line 

Companies are moving away from the highly-manual, siloed processes of the past. Ticketing was historically outsourced or handled by separate departments, with teams of employees printing tickets, rubber-banding them together, and then distributing them to the line. But manual processes like these are error-prone and time intensive, meaning they are unfit for the e-commerce era. Companies are finding they can achieve better time to market and reduce errors by opting instead for inline printing for hang tags and other ID. 

#2 Cloud extends printing outside of the DC’s four walls 

For labeling and ticketing, many retailers work with a patchwork of on-premise systems that don’t necessarily work well together. Data errors, delays, and maintenance costs are common problems among companies that work this way. Cloud, on the other hand, allows companies to extend standardized ticket printing across their operations, and even externally—meaning changes can be made quickly at any point in the process, at all locations, and with greater consistency.  Companies can extend standardized ticket printing across their own operations, out to their suppliers, and right to the retail floor, where being able to quickly change tickets and do price markdowns can significantly boost sales. 

#3 Emphasis on price agility  

For the apparel industry, time is everything. Putting garments into customers’ hands requires responding to demand faster than competitors and having the flexibility to alter pricing based on market conditions. Opportunities come and go quickly, and a cloud-based ticketing solution that can react rapidly to changes in pricing needs can be the difference between big gains or big losses. 

# 4 Managing the high volume of e-commerce returns isn’t getting any easier 

Ecommerce has skyrocketed over the past few years, and with it, the number of product returns that require handling has shot up as well. Items returned by consumers require new ticketing and tagging in order to be sold again, creating complicated work and hefty costs for manufacturers. To manage the intricacies of product returns, companies are searching for solutions that can handle changes on-demand and be deployed in whatever location is necessary. 

Read our full white paper for more information on these trends and how they are affecting retailers. You’ll also learn how to select the right labeling system for your company, as well as how one luxury retailer found big success by switching to a centralized labeling solution.