Over the past few months the consumer product packaging market has emerged as a promising area for our focus. Several global brand owners have told me about their ongoing problems with inventory theft and out-of-stock conditions and how RFID can solve them. These brand owners have watched the apparel market’s adoption of RFID with interest but have not been able to justify their own adoption due to the high cost of RFID tags and the awkward need to attach one onto the host item. Once these brand owners learned of our ability to integrate RFID functionality within their product packaging at a substantially reduced price point, they became intrigued. One brand owner spoke of our technology being a “no-brainer” and a “game-changer”. He explained that they currently pay 5-6 cents per EAS tag (those tags that set off an alarm if you walk out of the store without paying) without deriving much value. The notion of paying the same or less for integrated RFID functionality is very attractive.
I’ve subsequently spoken to multiple product packaging companies to further validate our solution. These companies buy paper-based materials and manufacture product packaging for brand owners. They try to differentiate with various types of printing, foils, coatings, etc. but struggle to do so. When presented with our technology, these packaging companies have universally expressed strong interest and enthusiasm. They see our offering as a way to add value to the packaging materials they sell brand owners and a way to strongly differentiate their offering. We have quickly moved into prototyping activity with several of these companies.
The market for RFID within consumer product packaging is huge (billions of $) and is one that the RFID incumbents are not generally servicing. They
lack the technology to deliver at the price point and with the form factor required and are strongly focused on servicing their core market (apparel tagging) which is growing 25% per year.
So, this looks like a great market for us to focus on—right? Well, yes, but at the same time we are seeing other attractive opportunities. In my previous big-company job, I would simply seek internal funding for our focus market and defer expending resources on anything else. But now I am at a startup and these other opportunities are tied to funding. I feel that I cannot ignore them as the funding they will bring in is needed to help us get to the consumer product packaging market. Fortunately, our core technology is applicable to all these opportunities without much variation or customization. But nonetheless, the question of determining the appropriate amount of focus to maintain at a given point in Uniqarta’s development continues and will be an ongoing challenge as we get more deeply involved in these multiple areas.