Selected work · operator track record
Electronic shelf labels: a rollout that reached 150+ stores across 10 countries, delivered.
We turned a shelf-label rollout that was being sold as paper-and-ink savings into a data, geo-location and supply-chain platform. This is team pedigree: operator work our team built over years inside IKEA, and the foundation the firm now stands on.
The problem.
Electronic shelf labels were stuck. Internally they were framed as a way to save on paper and ink, a small cost line that could never justify a global rollout. The business case was thin, and a thin case does not move a company that size.
The decision.
We refused the paper-savings framing. A price tag is not a label, it is a sensor and a position in the store. We rebuilt the case as a data, geo-location and supply-chain platform: NFC and RFID for live inventory, in-store navigation for customers, and logistics signal for the supply chain. Then we proved it fast, securing a €200K pilot budget from the CFO and shipping the first store in two days.
What we built.
An NFC and RFID shelf-label system that carried far more than a price: live inventory location, customer navigation, and a feed into supply-chain logistics, deployed toward 400+ stores. Hardware, software and the store operations to adopt it, not a slide. The pilot ran live in a New York store within two days of go-ahead.
The numbers.
On the floor it showed up as speed: price changes cut from 5 minutes to 20 seconds, full-store updates from a week to 5 minutes, and staff training from 2 hours to 30 minutes. The reframing, not the hardware, is what unlocked the value.
Want this thinking on your problem?
The skill here was not the tags. It was refusing the small framing and finding the platform underneath. That is what a FOCAL Diagnostic does for your situation.