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- SKECHERS x Century Lead: RFID Keeps Millions of Pairs of Shoes Managed, Found & Counted
SKECHERS x Century Lead: RFID Keeps Millions of Pairs of Shoes Managed, Found & Counted
With over 3,000 stores in China and a massive apparel and footwear SKU count, SKECHERS found traditional barcode methods could no longer support its rapid expansion. Century Lead deployed an RFID one-tag-per-item solution for SKECHERS, covering the full chain from factory to warehouse to store.
About SKECHERS
Founded in 1992, SKECHERS is the third-largest athletic footwear and apparel brand in the United States and has grown into one of the world's leading athletic lifestyle brands. Since entering the China market over a decade ago, SKECHERS has rapidly expanded to more than 3,000 offline stores nationwide on the strength of comfortable, stylish, and high-value products, while continuing to grow its e-commerce and new retail channels.
SKECHERS' goal was straightforward: as store counts expanded rapidly and SKUs kept multiplying, get the "basic but mission-critical" matter of inventory under control — enabling more efficient operations and a better customer experience.
But the real-world challenges were just as thorny. A standard SKECHERS store often carries over a thousand SKUs, with footwear adding complex size dimensions on top of apparel and accessories — an enormous inventory volume. In the past, barcode-based piece-by-piece stocktaking meant a single store needed 5–6 people working most of a day, sometimes overnight. It disrupted business and frequently produced errors. Receiving and shipping were equally painful — large cartons sent from warehouse to store had to be opened and checked item by item, an inefficient process prone to book-vs-physical mismatches. And when a customer asked, "Do you have this shoe in a size 42?", staff often had to run to the back and dig around for ages — a major hit to the customer experience.
Based on this real-world scenario, Century Lead built a custom end-to-end RFID solution for SKECHERS: attaching an RFID chip-enabled tag to every pair of shoes and every garment — essentially an "electronic ID card."
The solution didn't overturn SKECHERS' existing systems. Instead, through the Century Lead RFID management platform, it integrates with SKECHERS' existing ERP and store systems, syncing inventory data in real time so that online and offline truly operate as one pool of goods.
Once deployed, the changes in SKECHERS' store operations were visible to the naked eye.
Stocktaking time dropped from over 8 hours to around 2 hours — and can now be done during business hours, with no need to close the store. Receiving and shipping went from 10 minutes per carton to under 1 minute. Finding a product used to take an experienced staff member about 5 minutes; now any associate, no experience needed, can locate it within a minute. Staff no longer shuttle back and forth to the stockroom, and customers no longer wait around. Inventory accuracy holds steady above 99.9%, and headquarters can see the real inventory of every store and every SKU in real time — making replenishment and transfer decisions faster and more precise.
More importantly, employees are freed from tedious stocktaking and product hunting, redirecting more energy into serving customers. The time saved gets reinvested into sales and customer experience — with noticeable gains in both attachment rate and repeat purchase rate.
Making inventory management simple starts with RFID. Apparel and footwear brands are welcome to reach out to Century Lead for a tailored solution.
About Century Lead: RFID Solution Experts for the Fashion Industry
Founded in 2014, Century Lead provides clients with integrated solutions spanning software, hardware, RFID tags, and end-to-end digital-intelligent applications. Our core team brings over 25 years of experience in apparel and footwear industry informatization, plus 12 years of technical application experience in apparel and footwear RFID solutions. To date, we have built digital-intelligent solution applications for over 100 fashion apparel and footwear brands.
Headquartered in Guangzhou, Century Lead has established subsidiaries in Hangzhou, Beijing, Quanzhou, and Shenzhen, with coverage extending across most overseas regions including North America, South America, Australia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa — delivering premium solutions and products to fashion brands worldwide.
