Avery Dennison’s pilot with ACS Clothing leveraged RFID-enabled solutions to support circular business models and drive long-term value.
Introduction
Through a joint initiative, Avery Dennison worked with ACS Clothing to explore how real-time visibility enhanced operational efficiency and supported scalable management of high-volume garment flows.
ACS Clothing is one of Europe’s largest circular apparel hubs, processing 45,000 items weekly. Based in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, the business combines advanced technologies with circular economy principles to drive expansion and give new life to unwanted clothing. It needed real-time visibility across its complex garment lifecycle management processes, including resale, rental, refurbishment, and repair.
Challenge
The apparel industry is facing major market shifts that demand digital solutions. The upcoming EU ban on destroying unsold goods and the rapid growth of the second-hand market - projected to reach $367B by 2029[1] - are driving a surge in garment volume. To manage this influx and reduce costs, circularity hubs like ACS are working toward digital infrastructure. Without it, data barriers create inefficiencies, administrative burden, and limited ability to identify and track garments at scale.
ACS therefore teamed with Avery Dennison for a pioneering pilot project at the Glasgow, UK hub which ran for 1 month in 2025 , exploring how RFID could meet their capacity and traceability requirements.
Solution
The initiative began by strategically embedding 500 selected garments with unique, durable Avery Dennison RFID labels, giving each item a distinct digital identity.
As each RFID tagged garment progressed through its journey, its status was tracked at key stages: "Checking In," "Wash & Dry," "Repair," "Stock," and "Sold". ACS operatives managed the process using Avery Dennison RFID mini tablets, which enabled simple, swift scans. This real-time data was seamlessly captured and centralized on Avery Dennison’s atma.io connected product cloud, providing unprecedented visibility into the operational flow.
This integrated solution leveraging embedded RFID technology is a game changer unlocking crucial operational efficiencies and delivering visibility and traceability across an item's life, from intake and refurbishment to resale and rental. It enables real-time monitoring of garment location, condition, and treatment history across all operational touchpoints, fundamentally streamlining sorting, grading, and refurbishment processes.
Results
For ACS, the automated tracking greatly reduced the need for manual input and cut down errors during scanning at vital stages like "Check-In" and "Dispatch." This innovation achieved significant time and labor savings through rapid, non-contact scanning, all while supporting the management of large garment volumes, handling up to 45,000 items per week.
With embedded RFID labels, the system cut garment identification and check-in time by 90%, also capturing detailed information such as timestamps, processing status, repair history, and final destination tracking. This real-time visibility enhanced operational efficiency and supported scalable management of high-volume garment flows.
Real-time visibility and insights
The data collected included:
Check-in and check-out timestamps
Washing and drying status
Repair history and refurbishment treatments
Stock levels and sales readiness
Final destination (e.g., resale, rental, repurpose)
Analysis of this robust data set offered valuable insights into garment lifecycle management, including flow-through rates, average lifecycle duration, and repair frequency to optimize durability. This intelligence allowed for smarter resource allocation and dynamic, data-driven decisions via live dashboards, which in turn helped to reduce garment loss and ensure stronger compliance with service level agreements (SLAs).
Beyond immediate operational benefits, the RFID system helped ACS prepare for future legislation, including the planned EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) requirements.
“This pilot partnering with Avery Dennison is a major leap in our journey toward complete circular transparency. For the first time, we can tell the full story of a garment’s life, where it’s been, how it’s been cared for, and how it’s contributing to a more sustainable future. By embedding RFID tags, it delivered a 90% saving on the time needed to identify and associate garments at check-in.”
Andrew Rough
CEO, ACS, Advanced Clothing Solution
Download Avery Dennison’s White Paper: RFID for Circularity here.