a mock retail storefront in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood to show off the capabilities of RAIN RFID.
On a visit earlier this year, Impinj chief operating officer Eric Brodersen carried a couple of coats into a fitting room. A screen inside lit up with information about the coats. The system can also provide suggestions of complementary items, bringing Amazon-style suggestive selling into the physical world. And it can help shoppers communicate with store workers to get another size or color to try on.
Retailers such as Nordstrom and Rebecca Minkoff last year deployed these smart fitting rooms with help from eBay. Impinj wouldn’t say if its RFID technology was involved.
Another demonstration at the Impinj Retail Experience Center—which the company opened last year—shows how tracking the movement of individual items through a store can yield big insights. Overhead readers can see up to 1,000 tags per second within a 30-foot field of view.
With this new view of their stores, merchandisers can quickly learn which displays are most effective by counting how often items are picked up off of them by shoppers. And suppose one of those items makes frequent trips to the fitting room, but never to the checkout counter. That pattern—made visible by the RFID data—could help clothing designers spot a flaw in one of their designs.
While Impinj spent most of the last decade focused on developing the underlying RFID protocols and technology—the integrated circuits that go in the tags and readers, and the readers themselves—the company is now also building more sophisticated software to make the data generated by RFID more usable and valuable.
Diorio describes it as an operating-system layer, called ItemSense, that can elevate the RFID data and feed it into applications built by third-parties to deliver the kinds of capabilities demonstrated in the Retail Experience Center.
The 175-person company has hired software developers over the last two years and has about 20 openings across the business to meet growing demand, Diorio says. It is moving later this year to the booming South Lake Union neighborhood to accommodate the larger staff.
Impinj has not made public its revenue or profit figures since it withdrew paperwork for a public stock offering in 2012. It announced a $21.6 million funding round that summer. The company said at the time it had raised $135 million from investors including AllianceBernstein L.P., ARCH Venture Partners, GF Private Equity Group, Intel, Madrona Venture Group, Mobius Venture Capital, and Polaris Venture Partners.
While retail was the first and biggest adopter of RFID technology, the tags are popping up in lots of places now. They are in Washington state enhanced drivers licenses; in the automatic tolling system on the State Route 520 bridge; in the lift tickets at Vail Ski Resorts; in running bibs that track race times at marathons; and for tracking automotive parts during manufacturing, Diorio says.
Impinj sees another major customer in the healthcare industry. Hospitals in particular are putting tags on gurneys, wheelchairs, infusion pumps, and other assets that are used frequently. “You go to a typical hospital and they’ve got tons of this stuff because they don’t know where any of it is at any one time,” Diorio says.
Other healthcare applications include tagging pharmaceutical products to ensure their authenticity and integrity. And one hospital has used RFID tags to improve compliance with hand-washing, helping prevent the spread of infections.
These are the applications that get Diorio—a steadfast champion of the technology throughout more than a decade of development—most excited.
“I want to be pushing applications that help people, that reduce loss and waste, ensure the safety of the food supply chain, that prevent counterfeit pharmaceuticals, that do all kinds of good things,” he says.
