Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreigning us now for five insightful minutes is Spencer Hewitt, the founder and CEO of Radar, whose recent Old Navy partnership we featured in our Fast 5 podcast last month. Spencer, I was pretty direct in my assessment of the likelihood that Radar's RFID platform will ever roll out to all 1200 Old Navy stores. So tell us point blank, what did I get right and what did I get wrong in my assessment?
B (0:33)
Yeah, I think, you know, I, I think you're right in the sense that is a, it's a phased. It's a phased rollout. I think that, you know, Old Navy's a gap. Old Navy, they're, they're very smart retailer. They're pretty careful about their decisions. The great vision, I would say, for, for where they think physical retail can go. Yeah, I just say, like, listen, there's a reason why, like, American Eagle rolled it out to almost their entire fleet. You know, I think you guys mentioned some kind of bet, like, about putting up your house or something. I was wondering, like, what you might want to bet in case you were wrong.
A (1:16)
Oh, man, I don't know. Let's talk about. We should talk about that. The end. And I had that bet going and yeah, I don't know what you're not.
B (1:23)
You.
A (1:23)
You and I, that should be. But I'll buy you a beer. I see you.
B (1:27)
Yeah, I think, I think, I think worst case, like, if you're right, I'll get you a thousand dollar gift card to Old Navy. And then if, if I'm right, then, you know, we can come back on the show and talk about it.
A (1:41)
Yeah, I will eat crow in front of the entire audience. 100%. 100%. And like I said at the end of that podcast too, I hope you are right, actually. I hope you are right. I wish you the most success in, in what you're trying to do too. Well.
C (1:53)
And Spencer, I, I had a different opinion than Chris. Slightly different here. But I want to know if you can just tell our audience quickly, like, what is it about your platform specifically and the unique special sauce that you bring to rfid? And Wild Navy kind of chose you to roll this out in a phased approach, fleet wide.
B (2:15)
Yeah, for sure. So, you know, our approach to RFID actually started with wanting to deliver autonomous checkout as a use case for the industry. And like, when you look at that use case, it's a lot more stringent in terms of the requirements you need to meet for it. So it's like your location actually has to be better. Your latency and speed updates have to Be much faster. Your detect rate has to be super high. So we've architected our system to have the capability to enable autonomous checkup from the existing infrastructure that we deploy to retailers from today. And that has, you know, really driven core technological improvement. And like, one of the things that we've done differently is, you know, there were some companies that did this back in the day. Like, you know, Thing Magic had like a software defined radio approach where they could basically deploy hardware, they could update the signal processing remotely. You weren't stuck with like someone's reader chip. That's kind of more the approach that we've taken. So we control everything from the ground up, not just the hardware and the signal processing, but also the software layer. So we really become superior core technology. That's really just like one throat to choke for the retailer where they don't need to worry about integrating and cobbling together a bunch of different pieces to make a coherent solution. And that includes deployment and rollout management.