For about $150, a customer can go online and order a tuxedo, a shirt, shoes, cuff links, and a cummerbund or belt, and have the ensemble delivered a week before it is needed. Zimmer worked with designers to create Generation Tux's own line of private label apparel. To automatically manage the items that are moving into and out of is warehouse, as well as provide an aesthetically pleasing suit without any visible labels like those normally seen on rental apparel, the company is incorporating a radio frequency identificationtag into each garment.
Generation Tux is one of the first fully online tuxedo-wear companies, according to Matt Howland, the firm's CTO. "We decided to go big out of the gate," he says, so the company opened a Louisville, Ky., warehouse containing 30,000 suits, along with shirts, ties, shoes and accessories. Each pair of pants, as well as every jacket, shirt, tie and shoe, comes with a passiveEPC ultrahigh-frequencyRFID tag incorporated into it in a discrete fashion, with the aim of making the tag largely invisible to users. Tags are attached inside the heels of shoes, or are sewn into pants seams and into the collars or cuffs of shirts and jackets.
