This podcast is brought to you by the Omnitalk Retail Podcast Network, ranked In the top 10% of all podcasts globally, and currently the only retail podcast ranked in the top 100 of all business podcasts on Apple Podcasts. The Yamitalk Retail Podcast Network is the network that we hope makes you feel a little smarter, but most importantly, a little happier each week, too.
And today's podcast is just one of the many great podcasts you can find here from us at Omnitalk Retail alongside our Retail Daily minute, which brings you a curated selection of the most important retail headlines every morning, and our signature podcast, the Retail Fast Five, that breaks down each week. The top five headlines making waves in the world of omnichannel retailing that comes your way every Wednesday afternoon. I'm one of your co hosts for today's interview, Anne Mazinga.
And I'm Chris Walton. And Chris, I'm really excited about this podcast today because you and I have been talking about RFID and its many benefits for years. For years, at least. Yeah. Almost a decade, I think, Ann, quite honestly, I believe. I believe almost a decade.
And then we just went to the H and M store in soho, and that was a new experience for us because it's really showing us, like, how rfid, when utilized correctly for things like inventory management, merchandising, new fitting room experiences, and so much more, can really help improve a store. It's kind of seeing it come to life for the first time. 100%. Yeah, that store in New York was pretty, pretty impressive. Yes. Well, we got so many comments about that video that we.
We decided that it was time to bring in an expert. Chris and I have been. Have been following it, but we're not the experts when it comes to rfid. So we have somebody here who may be new to our amitalk Retail audience. So we're going to take a minute to introduce him, but also somebody that really has a lot of expertise and can sit down with us and talk about how RFID is really come to coming to life in today's stores.
And so it's with great pleasure that I introduce today's guest, Troy Cywick, the general manager and partner at Gray Orange, to help us get to the bottom of some of these questions for our Amitak retail audience. Troy, welcome. Thank you. Hi, Ann. Hi, Chris. Awesome to be here. Yeah, we're excited to have you. Troy, this is your first time you're on the Omnitalk Retail podcast. Did you do any sort of special prep for this?
Like, did you need to go on a retreat of some kind or something to get ready. Oh, wow. What is set up? Yes, I did a Zen yoga, clean eating, healthy living, Sedona triple with my wife. So I'm all Zen. You'll get the, you'll get the super chill inward reflecting. Troy, for this talk. My God, that's so awesome. You, you win for being most prepared for an Omnitak podcast. I'm so thrilled, so excited to have you. So, yeah, Troy, I can feel it in your voice.
Like you seem very relaxed, very like in the mood for this podcast, this conversation. I wish I could take some of your Zen, Zen like demeanor too. But before we get started, I want to, for our audience, give us a sense, give them a sense of who you are, what's your background and what qualifies you as an expert in rfid. Sure, sure. And by the way, talk to me on Thursday and the Zen will all be gone because we're on retail. We know how it goes. Yes, we do.
Yeah. So I'm at Gray Orange now, but pre Gray Orange, my history is always retail. I think I was born retail. So my first job out of college was Ulta, which back then. Oh wow. Ulta 3. Yeah, I know. Don't ask me to say when. And then I traveled to like small software companies, bigger software companies, servicing retail, eventually smarter commerce and IBM. My claim to fame was omnichannel before it was Omni, which is kind of cool for this, this talk. It was multi channel back then. Right.
Part of the gig. So I remember those days. Yeah, I was in the middle of a lot of those. First big retail ship from store, pickup from store. The best buys stapled, two day delivery was like a cool thing back then. Before Amazon. Yeah, a lot of those type of omnichannel, like Lowe's, you know, the ones that really leaned in back then. And then kind of later in my career it was more big tech retail consulting.
So all the sort of boring but, you know, important like ERP ServiceNow, HR transformations, all that big consulting stuff is what I was doing before I came here to Gray Orange. Oh my God. You were in ERP implementations and you still want to be in retail. That's. That's pretty impressive, my friend. Wow. Well, I'm not there anymore, so that might. You got out of here. He's moved to greener pastures. Yes, that's right. That's awesome. All right, well, let's talk about Gray Orange. So start by.
Let's start with, give a little background on what Gray Orange Is, and, and then you know, also what drew you to the company because your background is pretty steeped in retail at a lot of different angles. Yeah. So Gray Orange is company of about 700 people. It's 10 plus years old, although it feels like a startup based on the pace of change and everything we have going on. So supply chain automation for the biggest retailers.
So if you think of the next day, same day delivery concepts, those are all done with automation. Lots of really complex software, robotics. And that is what the core of what Gray Orange has been up till about two years ago. And that's still a huge piece of our business now for some of the biggest retailers.
And I would say two years back we, we took what the core of what that retail supply chain system looks like and brought it to some retailers and said, what if we had this level of intelligence and AI in the store, how could we innovate? And that's how we, we came to develop G Store in conjunction with some key retailers. So Troy, talk a little bit more about that. Like what is, what is.
I mean, people throw around the term supply chain automation all the time and, and you know, it's interesting to hear you say that, the layer of AI into it too, because we had Microsoft's Margaret sign in with us at Shop Talk fall and she said that supply chain was particularly one of the top three areas she's seeing retailers invest in AI. So, you know, how do those two things fit together? Give us some more detail on that.
Well, so, you know, my attraction to come here in the first place a couple years ago was we, you know, joked about ERPs and like it was kind of like you needed to convince people that those projects were cool. I couldn't talk about them at the, you know, at the poker parties or at the bar or anything like that. Like, there's just nothing. I did a financial transformation at, you know, XYZ retailer.
But a friend of mine actually called me, talked about Gray Orange, talked about the robots and the AI and I was kind of like skeptical, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I went and saw it. I actually saw it. What sold me on Gray Orange was to actually go to a retailer's fulfillment center and just see the magic happen. Hundreds of robots operating with humans, didn't replace all the humans, but. Right. You know, just the level of automation was beyond anything I had imagined.
And then to put myself mentally into, I could do this and I could go talk at the poker parties and say I just deployed 600 robots in Nashville at this place. Or, you know, I We have smart mirrors deployed at this, this retail. It just felt more real and more cool and more interesting and kind of like a, A possibility to get some energy back in the sales and be excited about each project that I do. So in the, you know, everybody AI and everything. AI in the drinking fountain. Right?
Everybody says AI, but it really is AI if you think about products start moving differently in retail trends, social media, and to allow algorithms to catch that, pick up on that and react, whether it's in a fulfillment center or in a retail store location is. It's real. Right. They come together and they, it's. It's. It's kind of cool to watch, right? Yeah. And I got to go, I got to go with you on that one because, like, yeah, which, which.
Which line would I want to use in a bar more often and robot or ERP implementation? I don't think it's a very close battle on that one. And do you agree? I don't know. I just love that Troy is like, it's really about what I'm going to tell my friends. It's not about what I'm actually doing. Even though both things are incredibly incredib. It sounds cooler to talk about. We get it. You're my, you're our kind of person, Troy.
Well, Troy, I want to, I want to like, narrow in on one particular area too that is important when you're working on faster supply chain and logistics, and that's rfid, especially because when I was just at Shop Talk Europe, I interviewed Gustav Zetterstrom, who's the SVP of Global innovation and Emerging technology at H and M. And when I asked him specifically, I was like, okay, I want to know.
You're deploying all these cool stores, but, like, what is the one innovation investment that you think has been most impactful to, you know, the success of your stores? And he said rfid, because of the things that you just talked about, it gives you better inventory, visibility, better ideas of where your products are in the fitting rooms, in the back of room, on their way to the store, or on the floor somewhere?
And I, you know, you're working with several retailers you mentioned to put G store in. In motion. Do you think that most of them would agree that RFID is really the, you know, would they agree with Gustav's sentiment that that's really what's supercharging their retail operations right now? Yeah, the. Well, it's in pockets, right? So RFID, much more prevalent, bigger ROIs in fashion, luxury.
I mean, RFID is all over the Place as you guys started this convers, it's in the warehouse, it's in loss prevention systems. But when you're talking about the visionary stuff that Gustav is doing, and he's great at talking about it by the way, he tells the story like no one else. You're talking about where the RFID tags make sense to be placed. So fashion shoes, things where there's decent enough margins to pay for all the technology and you can get that real time inventory availability.
So what Gustav and H and M are doing is overhead rfid. Next gen rfid. So what's been around for a long time is handheld RFID where you can walk around and I can get a sense of what's there if I'm in the vicinity. But the step up, the game changing stuff that the trend setting retailers are doing is overhead rfid. I know where everything is on an XY coordinate in the store and that's what they're doing.
And then if you take an application like ours, G Store, I think we're still the only one that has hundreds of stores deployed in production with overhead rfid. And you can link that to all the tech. Right. So the possibilities are endless when it comes to, you know, smart mirrors, sensing, hooking it up with video capture, you know, the existing cameras that are in the store to create, create different insights and signals for the store managers or the corporate office or the merchandising team.
So what are they. Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna say, Troy, like go even deeper into like what they're able to do that they weren't able to do before. Like what kind of visibility is this giving them about, like how people are interacting, you know, in a physical environment in a way that previously we could only tell from what they were, you know, like we'd only be able to get that level of detail, what they're taking into a fitting room, for example.
We'd only be able to do that if they, if we were watching that activity online, we wouldn't be able to do that in a physical environment. But what, what does this unlock for them? So if you think about my omnichannel days, way back when, it was kind of a thing to figure out, do you have inventory or not? Like binary in the store? So I'm on the website, I'm on the app. Does the store have inventory, yes or no? And then we gravitated towards, we have 10 of these, but the retailer probably had 15.
They just are being very careful, right, with safety stock. And they don't want somebody to be disappointed. And so now this technology, when combined with the software and the overhead readers, you know exactly how much inventory you have. 98%. So think of a constant rolling cycle count. With the RFID of two years ago, you still had to go around cycle counting and making sure you updated all your accounts. This is just done. It's done now, of course. Wow. We all have trust issues.
So they'll go audit and just make sure everything's working. You know, that's just always going to be the case, right? Sure, sure. But because they know where everything's at and how much they have, you now create a situation that we were aware of and we put in our software roadmap. But I don't think anyone knew how important it would become is replenishment from back of the store to the front of the store, or from one area to another area of the store.
So now you can have a situation where your top selling item in that soho store, for example, might be a jacket on a mannequin with four of them laying there on the display in the front. And they run out. Right. So two years ago they're just out and maybe the store manager notices it after an hour or two. Now we know before they run out or danger, danger if they, if they've already run out, go bring that to the store. It's a priority task in the software to bring those items up to the front.
And you know, our. We have customers that have told us, you know, this is changing the conversion rate in the stores that operate this technology. Yeah, yeah. The way I'd sum up what you say, Troy, is like the move from handhelds to overhead arrays. It gives you a perpetual state of inventory in your store. Right. Like constant state of inventory versus the handhelds are done at a single point in time. And yeah.
So for that reason, you don't get an understanding or an alert, which is kind of the smartness of the system too. Right. You don't get an alert when something's out of stock on the floor and sitting in your back room. And the other part too, Troy, if I'm not mistaken, it also helps you locate the product in the back room too, because of the overhead array. Like you can get a. You could get a good sense of where those products are.
Which in an apparel operation is not always the easiest thing to, to figure out if you've worked those back rooms. Is that also right? Exactly. And so if you think about it, in our application G store, we load the planograms, right. So they're Digitally loaded. So you have a 3D map. Wow. Or back room, front room, omnichannel area, if you have one of those. And so you have the location with a visual.
So it really makes the store associate experience way better because they just don't have to do any guesswork. They get within three feet, five feet, you know, depending on the store of exactly where the product is and they can kind of see where it looks like in that area. So, so that's available. And then, you know, Ann, you mentioned the, the back room or the changing room.
They, you know, so now you can be in the changing room, you can have the medium, you can ask the mirror, can you find me some shoes to match this? And can I get a small instead of a medium? And the associate can bring that to you without any verbal or any other conversation. Just because the availability of where that, you know, the connection of the tech and then knowing where the inventory is makes that all possible. Right.
Or not having to open the door half dressed and find an associate which. Who may or may not be there either. Right? Yes. Right. Yeah. Keep. All right, you said the phrase a couple of times. So G Store. So let's talk about that specifically. What is G Store in its definition and, and how, how do you envision it helping retailers? Or how does it provide a foundation for retailers for the innovation work that they want to do in this regard now, but also in the future?
Yeah. So, Chris, it's, it's not like what I described in my earlier career where people are doing these massive transformations, putting a feather in their cap, saying, I did $100 million SAP thing. Everything that we're seeing right now is use case and project driven. So they want to solve for some problem they're having. It could be cost based or it could be top line based. So I want to go from, you know, my RFID solution that's got 80 to 90% inventory accuracy to 98% accurate.
So, so we see these use cases and the entry point for us more often than not is RFID overhead. RFID and some kind of overhead. Yeah. Now after that, G Store is really an operational platform, you know, which isn't really what people are asking for in the marketplace right now. Nobody's going, hey, can I get a new operating system for my store? And, and the reason is because they often have like five or six apps there. So that's not a natural thing to ask for.
They might have Manhattan, SAP, IBM, Oracle, whoever, you know, whoever those providers might Blue yonder, those applications are in the store. So they don't naturally say, can I just, you know, replace all those with something? But we have the ability to do tasks, anything related to inventory, receiving, shipping, you know, client telling, all that kind of stuff is available. So our strategy really is not to oversell it, not to try and kick other people out, other systems out.
We just say here we'll provide you this use case and then that team can see the capabilities of G Store and realize it's a SaaS based platform that can help them operate many things in the store. But RFID tends to be the first one they want to do. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I, what doesn't make sense to me though is why this is becoming something that retailers are just starting to invest in now.
I mean you, you talked about cost being a major component, but is it because G Store is now able to do so much more? It's able to like once you invest in this, in this SaaS model, you're, you're getting more from it. You're able to track, you know, inventory location, you're able to understand planogram is better, you're able, like is it just that it's do, it's working harder. And so now retailers are making the investment or what, what's kind of keeping anybody from doing this right now?
I think the phase one or if we're just talking RFID right now. Yeah, the phase one was like a kind of a try it con. Well, I don't think the people that did it would call it a proof of concept, but. Right. Stick your toe in the water, figure this out. And I don't think they're seeing in many cases as big of an ROI as they would like to or expected to. And I also don't think store adopt. But what I'm seeing is we're picking up a lot of second try, like take two in the movies.
We're picking up that take two project. And it's because the adoption of handheld alone or whatever solution they implemented, the store associates weren't loving it. There's still that extra task in that leg. Extra task, not a big roi. I mean it's kind of cool.
They can, they can go find things and they can do a little bit of client telling, but just the step change that's happened in both the hardware technology, the ability to read it closer and then the software, you know, just connects all those points and gives all the insights. So the reason I, you know, those like the H and M, you reference Gustav, the reason they're doing it is because it's technically capable now, but then retail is this, you know, omnichannel, and retail is what you guys do.
You know, there's a wide range of the trendsetting ones that lean into technology, and then there's the ones that kind of just want to watch and see that didn't blow up. Okay, I can do it now, a year later. So we'll see a lot of trailing fashion and shoe retailers. We're seeing a lot. We're piloting a lot right now. Yeah. I mean, you brought up something else, Troy, that. That I just thought of.
Like, the other component of this is that because things are moving so quickly, trends are popping up on TikTok, and you as a. As a retailer, you have to be ready to respond with that inventory as quickly as possible, get it out so that people can. Can get their hands on it and purchase it. I imagine that there's other people within a retail organization who are interested in this technology now as well, too. Is that. Am I. Am I thinking about that the right way? I mean, is it.
I imagine like rfid, back in the day, when we were at Target, it was like our, you know, CIO or CTO was interested in that technology, but now it's like, okay, if I, as a marketing person, I can know that I can send people, you know, I can put this product on TikTok and people can find it in the store. Like that, to me, now gives more importance in investing in that type of technology. Absolutely.
I mean, I'm licking my chops because of all the groups that I've worked with in my retail career merchandising team. There's something for everybody. So merchant compliance. So imagine you have 1500 stores and you know where every piece of inventory is, and, you know, your planograms. Now you can. Now you can go, wait, how come the store in New Jersey doesn't have the product at the front of the store where the. Where they're supposed to have it in the planogram. This new.
This new release is out. Our new promotion is out. We're on tv. It's got to be there. Compliance. Get to that store manager and say, hey, go fix your displays. You're behind now. Heat mapping. And you got me going. So I'm, you know, keep. Keep me from. No, keep going for it. Yeah, but heat mapping, like so, showing all. We. We actually have this right now in pilot, showing all the regions of a world for a retailer and where they're at with compliance and backstock replenishment.
And this Store is red, they might need more help or maybe the store manager struggling. All the different things you can do for the different groups within the retail.
I mean, I, I could go on and on, but merchant compliance, one that comes to mind and then just thinking about real time reaction to what's happening between physical motion with consumers in a store, what, you know, what they're doing, they're going up to the mannequin, they, they see all the stuff, they're there, the traffic is there, and then they walk away and they don't take anything or they take something into the changing room, but more often than not they're leaving it in there.
Why does it not fit right? Is it the price point's not right? What could be happening? So all this is stuff you really can't do now with the tech that's there a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, this will change that. This will give some really cool stuff, including the social stuff. And I think you made me think of H and M. There's a TikTok out there where there, there's a customer working on a smart mirror going, oh my God, I'm shook.
I just ordered like, like she was like going crazy because of all this new technology that they're deploying. Yeah, that's an interesting point, Troy. I mean, I've never thought about that. That, you know, as omnichannel continues to advance, the use cases for the foundational technologies are hitting more parts of. Because, yeah, the heat mapping is interesting from the merchant standpoint because I, as a former merchant, want to know that my product is out there.
And then from the store operations perspective, the district managers, the regional managers, the store managers, they can basically have an audit of their store that it's set correctly visually at the press of a button. They don't even have to go into the store anymore to see who on their teams are compliant with the orders that are being given to headquarters. So, yeah, so there's a whole host of use cases here that are really interesting. All right, so.
So if we buy into that, which, like I said at the outset, and I've been talking about this for 10 years, and we've seen the heat maps in practice and they're pretty darn cool. What do retailers need to think about, though, to get themselves ready to test this type of overhead technology in the store, or G store more broadly, what do they need to think about to get that right? So we really play in two spaces. We play in RFID and non rfid.
I think we focus a Lot of the conversation because it's really hot right now on rfid. So there's a lot of physical things that happen in an RFID project. So we always push for like a one to three store pilot. We have a big retail chain right now that said, we want 10, you know, we're going to listen to the client, but, you know, we like to start out small so we can figure out what works, what doesn't work, with the associates being core.
So what we've learned and corrected is even if the retailer isn't thinking about it this way, where's the store associate now? The real one, not the one that works in corporate, the real one in the store in Los Angeles. Right. We want to. We want her in the room saying, this works. This doesn't work. Can I have this? Can I have that? So we can configure it. Right. And then the physical things tend to get either pushed aside or not thought about a lot.
So you have to do physical work in the stores. And the ceilings and then readers are complex. This is new technology. So if you have metal, lots of metal, if you have metal displays, you know, you have to kind of figure out, is this interfering with the signal? Do we need to tweak things? And if you don't put that in the primary part of your piloting, you miss it. You go to rollout and you start to wonder, why is this happening? How come we're getting, you know, errors and stuff like that?
So there's a lot of physical things other than the software and the project itself, you have to think about out and add to that. But I. I think piloting. So we've only had one client ever in our history, pilot and then not go to rollout phase. Right. So piloting, getting it right, and then they're like super excited. Especially the best sales reps for us are the store associates, because when they like it, they help us sell it internally. Got it. Troy, you made me think of something, too.
I've never asked this question before. So as. As you go from pilot stage to rollout because of the unique dynamics of individual store locations? I use metal as an example. Does it mean the technology scales easily, or do you have to take into account individual store idiosyncrasies as you go from pilot to store rollout? The latter, but it's not. I haven't seen a huge issue, but it has to be considered. So we have a luxury brand that we're rolling out.
And you know, just like every other retailer, they have different store formats. And there was a format that has a lot of fixturing, and that fixturing happens to be metal. Right. So we had to go back and move things around a little bit to make it work. After the fact, that retailer wasn't super happy, you know, because that costs money and time and your inter. You got people in the store when they're trying to sell stuff, you know, so it wasn't anybody's fault necessarily.
But there is that little bit of tweaking. So you can't just assume you pilot this store and you can roll it out the same way across all the stores. It hasn't been a big problem, but it does need to be something. You think about it, if there's a big variation in the style of store and the size footprint you have, you have to probably do a pilot in one of each of those stores just to make sure you get all the kinks worked out. Got it.
It's not a set and forget go from pilot to implementation, which is important to think about. Yeah. Well, Troy, that brings up some other questions that I'd love to close out with, is just how you think about, especially things like RFID usage and what's on the horizon. What other capabilities are there for retailers who are investing in this now and kind of in the future? What. What's ahead? Well, I think the technology players will all have their, their different version of this story.
And there's. That's why partners are super important to us, is that they're going to bring things we didn't think about. You know, we work with a lot of them, but for us, where, where we're seeing our roadmap go, and, and we know the clients will benefit from this is really around the signals and analytics that are going to come from being able to use all these. I mean, RFID is one type of sensing. Right. It's important. It's the most important in, in. In my opinion.
But all the other sensing that comes in coming into one single platform. Okay. And then being able to send those signals to the decision makers and the retailers. I know that sounds simplistic, but the power of the information we'll be able to give them about what's happening in the store. And so that's management capabilities, Ann. And then think about the customer side. Think of the apps that the customer has, whether they're in the store or she's at home or on the web.
Being able to know exactly where something is. If you're in a hurry and you're running through Manhattan and you want to Pick up a jacket or whatever, it might be a new pair of shoes, not just knowing they have it or don't have it, go in the store, turn right, it's right here. Or you want me to reserve it for you and leave it at the front? Just the level of ability to promise will be so much greater and the safety stocks can go away for the most part.
And your ability to keep your promise, the confidence level of the consumer going into that store for the stores that do this is just going to be high. There's like, like I said I could go on and on, but yeah, those are the things that are coming in the future.
Well, I think, especially as you think about, you know, like how, how the, just the changes that Google rolled out, like I think we, I keep thinking about how that's going to impact things if the store has better visibility to yes, I have this product, I'm, I'm the closest option to you, or yes, I can ship this product to you. All of those inputs are going to be important for retailers to have too.
And you're right, it's things like, you know, one, having RFID, for example on the product so you know where it is.
But even more importantly, having all of your systems feeding to kind of one main brain that's able to distribute that information to the multiple touch points out there, whether it's results in a Google search or it's, you know, in your own app that you're able to, you know, put something on hold for buy online pickup in store from a customer or for associates who are trying to find those items in store.
It's all going to come down to really having, having that information at your fingertips in real time. It sounds like it's, it's, it's like when the iPhone updated and provided like within three. I mean it's really similar if you think about it. Remember when the iPhone was able to detect your location within 3ft or 3 meters. I can't remember what it was that enabled the Ubers of the world to do what they do now. And the door dash analogy like that.
And that's the kind of step change I think we'll see. So your Google example is perfect. We will see that. And the chat, just think of the chat capabilities, you being able to, you know, maybe it's not hey, Siri. But you know, hey, chat bot, I need to find, I like this. Can you find me a pair of shoes and a belt to match this that are in stock? You know. Oh yeah, sure. You know, let me guide you to that. There's just a lot of possibilities. You know, we're just getting started.
Yeah. And then you as a retailer, have the confidence that it can all get executed for the consumer behind the scenes, and you may or may not even need to be involved in that discussion or that transaction. The end of the day. Wow, that's that. I might steal that analogy, too, about the Apple. The Apple update, because that was really good. And I like how you said main brain, too, because that's essentially what we've been talking about here.
We've been talking about G Store as the OS or the operating system for a new way of doing retail with, you know, RFID being a key linchpin in that, you know, system by way of the overhead array, too. So. So, Troy, that was awesome. Thank you so much. If people want to get in touch with you, learn more about Gray Orange, what's the best way for them to do that?
Yeah, just go to grayorange.com and to look at G Store, you can just click on the retail stores link and, you know, hopefully we'll post a link of that for people to go to and we can respond. Heck yeah, we will, Troy. Heck, yeah, we will put that link in our podcast description. So for those listening, be sure to check that out. All right, well, that wraps us up. Thank you to Troy for sitting down with us today. Thanks to everyone out there for listening in, as always.
And on behalf of all of us at Omnitar, be careful out there.