Louis Garneau: Meeting Retail RFID Labeling Requirements Without Rebuilding the Workflow

The requirement came from the customer, not the factory

Louis Garneau manufactures cycling and sports apparel for large retail customers, including companies with RFID labeling mandates. The business problem was straightforward: products had to leave the factory with the correct RFID label and encoding, but the company did not want to rebuild its existing systems simply to satisfy a new customer requirement.

That distinction shaped the project. Retail RFID compliance is not primarily a tracking problem inside the supplier's facility. It is a labeling and data problem at the point where a finished product is prepared for a customer. The label has to carry the right printed information, the RFID inlay has to be encoded correctly, and the serial identity has to meet the retailer's specification.

The challenge was fitting RFID into an existing workflow

Louis Garneau already had established production and labeling processes across facilities in Canada, the United States and Mexico. Introducing a new standalone RFID application would have created another place for operators to enter data and another system for IT to maintain.

FactorySense therefore approached the project as an integration problem. Rather than asking operators to change how they generated labels, the RFID layer was designed to sit alongside the existing workflow and add the required encoding at print time. That is the same principle described in our guide to RFID printing and encoding standards: the business system should remain authoritative, while the print-and-encode layer turns the existing identity into a compliant physical label.

A two-day path to compliant printing

FactorySense installed RFID-capable printers and edge computing at Louis Garneau's Canadian headquarters. The integration translated the existing print job into the RFID data required by the retailer, encoded the inlay and produced the human-readable label in the same operation.

Within two days, the facility was producing GS1-compliant RFID labels. The important result was not simply speed. Operators did not have to learn a parallel data-entry process, and the company did not have to rework its ERP or production systems to accommodate the mandate.

The same approach could then be repeated

Once the Canadian workflow had been proven, Louis Garneau extended the solution to Mexico and other locations. The core pattern stayed the same: receive the information the business already uses, convert it into the required RFID identity, print and encode the label, and verify the result before the product leaves the facility.

That repeatability matters for manufacturers serving several retailers. Mandates differ, but the underlying production problem is similar. The supplier needs one controlled way to turn its existing item data into whatever compliant label the customer requires without multiplying manual steps on the factory floor.

What this deployment shows

RFID compliance projects are often presented as if the manufacturer has to choose between changing its internal systems or accepting a manual workaround. Louis Garneau shows a third path. When the data already exists, the RFID function can be introduced at the edge of the workflow and kept largely invisible to the operator.

The project also became a starting point for broader use of RFID data inside the business. That expansion was possible because the compliance requirement had been solved without creating a disconnected labeling process. For manufacturers facing a similar mandate, the first design question should therefore be how to preserve the workflow that already works while adding the identity and verification the customer now requires.