Avery Dennison unveils Pathfinder 6140 printer at NRF Expo

The Pathfinder 6140 is being featured at the NRF 102nd Annual Expo booth #143, where retailers will experience its potential through a hands-on interactive exhibit. The Pathfinder 6140 solution was created in the Avery Dennison Customer Design and Innovation Centers (CDIC), the company’s innovation incubator where advanced research is developed with industry partners and retailers.

The Pathfinder 6140 is the fastest, most, lightweight and cost-efficient way to do item-level markdowns and enables retailers to add productive and accurate markdowns to the list of benefits gained by using smart devices in their stores.

Markdowns are a fact of life in apparel, with 35% of unit volume moving at discounted pricing. Effective execution is critical, since sales late in the season depend on giving the customer a good deal, but most retailers currently rely on an inaccurate, labor-intensive process that falls dramatically short of achieving desired results. Using the traditional “red pen” markdown process, store associates can only complete three garments per minute with 63% accuracy.

1 That means that over a third of items are mismarked, leading to lost sales when a potential customer fails to see the deal the retailer intended to offer. There’s also no way for the merchandising team to monitor the timing and execution of the markdown process, and to work with store operations to address stores that have particular execution challenges.

The Pathfinder 6140 delivers a complete solution to this critical retail problem. For the store associate, it’s surprisingly simple: in one smooth motion they scan the bar code on the price ticket, and apply a new price label that matches the new price the retailer has set for that SKU. They can scan and mark 15 garments per minute at nearly 100% accuracy. In the background, the price management application logs their activity, enabling the central merchandising team to confirm that markdowns were completed on time, and store operations to adjust labor planning based on actual productivity.

According to Shawn Neville, president, Retail Branding and Information Solutions, Avery Dennison, "This smart item-level markdown solution not only reduces pricing errors but, but the Pathfinder 6140 also improves margins and operating efficiencies across the end-to-end supply chain. With the Pathfinder 6140, retailers can leverage their smart device technology investments to ensure accurate and productive price marking – leaving associates more time to focus on what really matters: satisfying customers through an improved shopper experience.”