Scarpe & Scarpe

The story of Scarpe & Scarpe started in the 1950s, when its founder – Dino Pettenuzzo – began selling shoes in local Turin markets and opened a few shops in the city. Since then, Scarpe & Scarpe has slowly succeeded from being a medium-sized Italian company to becoming one of the key players in the Italian footwear market. Currently, there are 150 Scarpe & Scarpe stores spread across the country, employing around 2,000 people.

Scarpe & Scarpe had the ground-breaking intuition to apply a typical mass-market distribution model to the footwear channel. The brand’s success was built on broad merchandise variety, product quality and price competitiveness. On top of that, the company optimized store sizes (around 1,500–2,500 square meters) and leveraged their widespread presence in shopping centers in major Italian shopping streets, which contributed to their growing success.

Founded as a shoe retailer, the company has been able to expand its core business over the years to offer casual clothing and sportswear, along with luggage, leather goods and accessories.

On top of this broad offering, Scarpe & Scarpe stores also feature dedicated displays for selected high-end footwear and clothing brands.

Due to its wide product assortments, open displays and several high-risk, high-theft categories such as bags and accessories, the retailer decided to update its Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) portfolio to help improve merchandise tagging effectiveness. The main goal was to help boost loss prevention efforts and reduce shrink while simultaneously simplifying store operations.

Since Scarpe & Scarpe were operating in a highly competitive sector, the retailer also wanted to encourage more personalized in-store shopping by offering customers the fastest, simplest and most efficient shopping experience possible.

To solve these challenges, management decided to look for a solution capable of mitigating the risk of theft, while enhancing the shopping experience.

Scarpe & Scarpe recognized the strategic importance of advanced loss prevention technologies for its business and decided to adopt the innovative InFuzion Magnetic anti-theft tag, the first in the new, innovative InFuzion EAS tagging series.

The benefits of InFuzion tags quickly became visible during the in-store trials. InFuzion’s unique one-piece design eliminated the need to store tags and pins separately, speed up tag removal time at the point of sale (POS) and helped improve managerial operations.

The integrated pin also helped reduce the previous issue of having to replace lost and damaged pins and ultimately eliminated the need for pin replacement orders.

Scarpe & Scarpe also discovered that the Infuzion anti-theft tag’s distinctive shape and locking mechanism was different from common tags and confused shoplifters accustomed to conventional two-piece tags.

This innovative design proved to be less susceptible to shoplifters and made it almost impossible for the tag to be manipulated and removed without damaging merchandise.

The Infuzion tag also scored high for its aesthetics. Its reduced size and lightness, together with the narrow, extremely smooth pin, allowed tag application on practically all types of merchandise, even on very light garments and fine fabrics.

During the in-store trials, the InFuzion antitheft tag has proved its ease of use. Store associates appreciate that the tags can be quickly applied and removed with only one hand, allowing them to spend less time on operational tasks and more time assisting customers.

“InFuzion’s characteristic design has standardized and improved the tag application process, as the tag itself can only be applied in a visible position, at the edge of the merchandise.

We see this as a big advantage, especially during the removal process, as it increases the speed of merchandise detachment, reduces the search time for the tag on items and makes ‘missing the tag’ practically impossible.” - Mr. Fabio Guarino, Loss Prevention Manager at Scarpe & Scarpe

All this adds to an enhanced customer experience by reducing wait time at POS and eliminating alarms from non-removed tags.

Sensormatic Solutions performed usability testing to measure the performance differences in speed and efficiency to apply and remove one-piece versus two-piece tags on a variety of items in different sizes and fabrics. Unsurprisingly, the InFuzion Magnetic tag had the fastest application and removal time, delivering a 40% overall time savings.

Scarpe & Scarpe also appreciated the great time savings in tag application and removal operations.

Scarpe & Scarpe’s goal has always been to offer customers an extensive and complete assortment of footwear and leather goods to fully satisfy their customers’ needs. Thanks to the increased effectiveness of the loss prevention program supported by InFuzion anti-theft tags, the company continues on its path to become the number one footwear retailer for Italian consumers.

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Sensormatic Solutions is the leading global retail solutions portfolio of Johnson Controls enabling smart and connected shopper engagement. By combining critical insights into retail inventory, shopper traffic and loss prevention, Sensormatic Solutions powers operational excellence at scale and helps create unique shopping experiences. Our solutions deliver real-time visibility and predictive analytics for accurate decision-making across the enterprise, enabling retailers to confidently move into the future. With more than 1.5 million data collection devices in the retail marketplace, we capture 40 billion shopper visits and track and protect billions of items each year. Our retail portfolio features the premier Sensormatic, ShopperTrak and TrueVUE brands. Please visit https://www.sensormatic.com, or or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and our YouTube channel.