Tagging products at the source has long been a staple in the retailer’s toolkit. And while the principles of Source Tagging still remain largely the same today, they, like virtually all retailers, have had to change to meet the evolving retail landscape.

Between high rates of shrink and the growing threat from organized retail crime (ORC) and new shopper expectations, retailers can do — and tag — more with Source Tagging than ever before.

However, Source Tagging isn’t just for apparel or electronics — or just for any vertical, really. In fact, most of today’s retail goods can benefit from tagging at the source. With tags and labels available for hard-to-protect products both big and small, you’ll want to make sure you’re tagging everything you can to minimize shrink, optimize labor, and improve the customer experience.

Review the high-theft, hard-to-protect product categories below to find out if you’re protecting everything you can, along with the tag and label options best-suited to help you secure each one.

Consumables consistently rank among the most-stolen goods across the world. They’ve also traditionally been difficult to tag. Fortunately, Sensormatic Solutions' labels offer an alternative.

Available in both sheets and rolls, along with high-performance microwaveable and insertable varieties, labels are as diverse as the products you sell. Ideal for protecting products like high-end meat and cheeses, Sensormatic Solutions labels provide discrete product protection and reliable deactivation at the point of sale to reduce nuisance alarms.

But labels aren’t the only lever available to retailers looking to reduce shrink. For bottled products like wine and spirits, hard-tag caps are specially designed to protect high-value wine and spirits without obstructing branding and display options. The tops provide just enough visual deterrence to would-be thieves without obfuscating the product for well-intentioned shoppers.

Shoppers are no strangers to seeing tags on items like apparel, but innovation in tagging technology has led to the creation and implementation of embedded tags to help retailers protect even more product categories than before. Embedded tags can be integrated into certain products permanently to work seamlessly with deactivation at the point of sale.

Footwear, for example, can benefit greatly from this alternative, with the option to now have tags integrated inside the heels of shoes during the manufacturing process. These products arrive at the store in a sales-floor-ready state, relieving associates of the task of tagging and helping to create a more seamless experience for shoppers.

Even better, choosing to place tags enabled with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) during that process can drive value beyond shrink prevention. That was the case for Renner. The Brazilian fashion retail giant undertook a large-scale Source Tagging project using Sensormatic Solutions technology. By tagging more than 500 million of the company’s products with RFID-enabled tags, Renner gained unprecedented item-level visibility across their 400-plus physical and digital storefronts.

That’s because RFID-powered tags contain item-level merchandise data that improves inventory visibility and can provide signals that can be collected and read automatically via the cloud which accelerates inventory counting and provides a real-time look into your inventory throughout the supply chain. That visibility helped Renner optimize their inventory management capabilities, ultimately reducing their out-of-stock rate by 87% and increasing their inventory accuracy by 64%.

Your high-end and luxury goods aren’t going unnoticed, either. With the median cost of goods stolen on the rise, failing to protect your high-value merchandise could hurt the bottom line even more than it did before. New, innovative tags can provide the same amount of aesthetically pleasing protection for handbags, cosmetics, fragrances, and more. Meanwhile, specialty labels that are more easily affixed to small goods remain available in this segment, too, to help protect hard-to-tag products, from lipsticks to makeup brushes and beyond.

The more you tag, the better. Ideally, you’ll want your complete inventory covered or as close to it as you can get. With more products tagged, you’ll naturally be able to minimize shrink, but you also might notice a number of new benefits.

When you choose to source tag products with tags and labels, you’ll be protecting more products with subtly secure tags that provide minimal disruption to the shopper experience. This allows for open merchandising, helping retailers overcome the barrier of placing too many items behind the barrier. Source Tagged products can be stored safely out in the open, eliminating the need to store products behind glass for a frictionless shopping experience.

Secure products and satisfied customers are a powerful combination that can help drive sales and reduce losses for increased profitability. But the value doesn’t stop there. Products tagged at the source arrive to the store in shelf-ready state, freeing associates to focus on higher-value activities like selling and customer assistance. Optimizing your labor levels in this way can lead to even greater efficiency and lower costs on top of what you already realized by transitioning tagging over to the source and away from the store.

Source Tagging has evolved alongside the retail landscape, growing from a novel nice-to-have solution to a near make-or-break necessity. As retailers navigate high rates of shrink, ORC, and shifting consumer expectations, tagging at the source offers a robust strategy to reduce losses while enhancing the customer experience.

Ready to revamp your Source Tagging strategy or have a question about a product category not listed here? Contact a Sensormatic Solutions expert today to discover all the options we have available to help you reduce losses, optimize labor, and deliver stellar customer experiences.