StORES Magazine - September 2007 - (Page 54) WORTH WATCHING / LABELS A More Able Label? “Electronic paper” allows for frequent updates, greater efficiency BY LEN LEWIS F ew retailers wouldn’t take advantage of an opportunity to replace an obsolete, expensive and labor-intensive activity with a system that provides a competitive advantage in the form of accurate pricing and promotional information and improved customer communications. A number of them are doing just that by foregoing paper-based price labels in favor of wireless LCD point-of-purchase displays. “This technology has the potential to change the way North American retailers do business,” says Clive Mayne, CEO of Windsor, U.K.-based ZBD. “Manual paper labeling is labor intensive, costly and too slow for retail managers to react to sales trends and competitive pressures.” ZBD’s solution, called epop, “is already helping retailers cut costs, reduce product wastage and increase sales, enabling them to gain marginal revenue they wouldn’t have otherwise earned.” In an industry with razor- film sandwiched between the pieces of glass on the front of the display. “It’s like electronic paper that only requires power when it is updated,” he says. The displays are controlled by means of an RF bounce communicator, which tracks the number of units in the store and what’s being displayed on them. “It’s a network-enabling tool so you can send images from headquarters to the bounce units in the stores, which then send price and other information out to the respective epops,” Rogers says. “It gives retailers an audit trail for everything that’s gone to each display unit.” “This technology has the potential to change the way North American retailers do business.” – Clive Mayne, ZBD thin margins, “every extra dollar counts and our customers are getting a significant investment from Day 1,” says David Rogers, vice president of sales and marketing for ZBD Displays, a spin-off of QinetiQ, the company that invented the technology behind the epop LCD displays about six years ago – first for the military and satellite systems, but now exclusively for the retail arena. “It was meant for any applications that required low power consumption,” Rogers says. The epop unit doesn’t require pixels to be charged; it has a chemical 54 STORES / SEPTEMBER 2007 Paper labeling has become an expensive, inefficient process, Rogers says, and retailers around the world “have come to realize that it’s not just the cost of paper tickets, but checking and making sure that all the processes – from the back office to the point of sale – are correct.” And if you print them in-store, “managing and distributing them is very labor intensive.” Moreover, a lot of expensive mistakes can be made. “There are examples in the U.K. where some retailers have had a 25 percent error rate on prices with paper tickets,” Rogers says. And with every error there is the potential for a trading standards fine, which can range from $6,000 to $10,000. Even without a fine, price discrepancies can be expensive since U.K. retailers are required to offer consumers the lower price. WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG
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