Prada S.p.A. is an Italian luxury fashion house with annual net sales of around three billion euros. It specializes in leather handbags, travel accessories, shoes, ready-to-wear, perfumes, and other accessories.

If you can’t tell if a knockoff Prada bag is fake, your NFC-enabled smartphone will be able to.

It’s no surprise that apparel and retail are important markets for NFC. In addition, a case can be made for the pandemic’s impact, helping to expose several weak links in the non-digital omnichannel chain, hastening the need and the move toward NFC solutions.

Consumers purchasing bags, purses, shoes, and accessories manufactured by Italian fashion house Prada will soon be able to authenticate a product and access information about how and where it was made by scanning an embedded NFC tag with their mobile device.

Prada has already begun using NFC tags to track each product through the manufacturing and delivery processes to the point of sale and is now planning to leverage the technology to offer a range of digital customer experiences that will also include personalized purchasing suggestions and the potential to order and customize specific items.

The use of NFC chips to provide each product with a unique digital identity “allows a very smooth operation from the industrial side to stores, and in the future, will enable connectivity with consumers throughout the life of the product,” Prada’s industrial director Massimo Vian told a Vogue Business webinar.

“We are thinking to upload images of that product during the production moment, even a video clip with the Italian maestros in Tuscany talking to a consumer — ‘Hey, I am Mrs Maria and I am building your product and I am so proud’ … And it’s not any purse, it’s that very purse. And to that extent the information we can pass onto the customer is infinite and moreover unique.

“By scanning your purse, bag or pair of shoes, you could have immediately suggested that that bag was part of one look from spring-summer 2021 and you could buy together other items to complete that look.”

“What is important is to establish the connection with the product, that that product was made in a specific place, and, of course, trustability in sustainable materials is important and will be more and more important,” Vian said.

“Through these chips, I think in the future the customer will be allowed to understand where the leather will come from, which type of leather, and how many grams of CO2 have been emitted to that leather. I think that information will be crucial to the consumer in the near future, and the chip and the technology will allow that.”

Going forward, Vian hints that Prada might enable customers to customize products before they are produced. “The potential is infinite,” Vian says. “For us, it’s important to link the consumer to our product and the heritage of the product.”