Both Comic Stores outlets in Malaga, Spain offer a wide variety of merchandise, ranging from comic books to memorabilia and clothing such as t-shirts, badges, stickers, and more. Since its opening 20-plus years ago, Comic Stores have been faced with the typical challenges found within its industry. With a high number of expensive collector pieces and limited floorspace, the stores have encountered several issues including misplaced items, the fast change of new stock, and many returns to suppliers.
The set-up of two stores in one city (Malaga) was expected to facilitate the traffic and stock exchange between the two stores, however it was often difficult to keep track of the inventory and ship desired items from one store to the other.
Additionally, since Comic Stores offers a buy-online-ship-to-home option not only in Europe, but also across America, Asia, and Australia, they needed a reliable and real-time view of their inventory to realize the shipments in a timely matter.
Comic Stores had three main challenges it was looking to address: inventory accuracy, inventory location, and shrinkage.
After partnering with Sensormatic Solutions, the company was able to improve stock accuracy to the level of approximately 98 percent. So far, over 55,000 items were tagged across two stores, resulting in benefits such as:
- Fast and easy weekly inventory counting
- Inventory visibility for a large number of small and unique items (comic books, memorabilia, and clothing)
- Quick search on misplaced items
- Operational improvements, like easier item transfers between stores
- Enabling click and collect and online fulfillment
“Once we implemented Sensormatic’s RFID solution across our two shops, it became unthinkable for us to go back,” said Pablo Díaz, vice managing director, Comic Stores. “In addition, we also want to continue to advance with this technology by implementing it to support more processes in our daily work and expanding it across all our stores.”
Sensormatic’s inventory intelligence team was approached to assess the viability of the RFID solution for Comic Stores.
Comic Stores’ journey with RFID is far from being over. As next steps, the company is planning a full integration of the Sensormatic IQ TrueVUE Platform with its POS and ERP systems to get further insights on inventory, shrink patterns, and shopper behavior.
