Walk into a modern apparel store and the difference from a decade ago is striking. Instead of walls stacked with every size and color of jeans and T-shirts, you see clean displays with just one or two of each SKU on the floor. The rest of the inventory is tucked away in stockrooms or micro-warehouses, ready to be pulled when needed.
The look is minimalist, but the operations behind it are anything but. When so few items are visible at once, even small lapses in tracking or replenishment can cost sales and erode the customer experience.
This is the intelligence gap of brick-and-mortar retail. Ecommerce platforms operate with continuous visibility – every click, search and purchase is captured instantly. Physical stores, meanwhile, still depend on manual counts, delayed reports and staff intuition to understand what’s selling, what’s missing and what needs restocking. That disadvantage is becoming harder to ignore as shoppers expect seamless experiences in every channel, and a missed restock can be all it takes to drive them to a competitor.
From Point-in-Time Tools to Continuous Awareness
For decades, physical stores have relied on two main tools for visibility: barcodes and electronic article surveillance (EAS). Barcodes are scanned manually – at checkout, during cycle counts and in the stockroom – and have become the backbone of inventory systems. EAS tags, on the other hand, were designed to deter theft, triggering alarms if unpaid merchandise crossed the exit.
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Together, they provide useful signals. But both are episodic. Barcodes only provide data when a human scans them, so the view is always partial and delayed. EAS tags produce a simple yes-or-no signal at the door, without offering insight into how merchandise moves across the floor.
Those limits may have been manageable when stores carried deep inventories and replenishment cycles were slower. Today, retailers need to know which SKUs are selling fastest, which sizes are disappearing first and how displays are shaping shopper behavior as it happens. Unfortunately, many of the existing solutions – more staff on the floor, more cycle counts more manual scanning – only add cost without solving the core problem.
Ambient IoT: Technology Built for Retail
Retail has long looked to the Internet of Things (IoT) for answers, but most approaches have fallen short – too costly, too complex or too reliant on batteries to work across thousands of items on the store floor. Ambient IoT changes that.
This new class of battery-free Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags draws power from wireless power networks (WPNs), transmitting data from every product continuously in the background. Ceiling- or wall-mounted WPN nodes energize thousands of tags at once, turning visibility into a built-in layer of the store environment rather than an extra operational step.
Many industries have already shown what Ambient IoT can unlock: in pharmaceuticals, sensors track temperature to keep medicines safe in transit; in grocery, connected labels monitor freshness and rotation to reduce spoilage.
The logic is no different for retail. Placed on apparel, footwear or accessories, Ambient IoT tags turn every item into a live data point. Instead of a “beep” at the exit, stores gain continuous awareness: how items are moving across the floor, which SKUs are trending and when replenishment is required. Because the tags are powered wirelessly, there are no batteries to replace, no dead zones to manage and no interruptions to data flow.
Consider the difference this makes in practice. If a run on large jackets begins on a Friday afternoon, managers can see the trend immediately and adjust displays or replenish stock before shelves sit empty on Saturday morning. If a customer abandons a pair of shoes in the wrong aisle, the system can locate it in seconds. If medium sizes are selling out faster than expected, replenishment can be triggered before customers encounter gaps.
The result is a responsive storefront that mirrors the intelligence of ecommerce while preserving the advantages of in-person shopping. It reduces the guesswork for associates, cuts down on manual scanning and ensures shoppers see the right products at the right time.
Where Brick-and-Mortar Takes Back the Edge
Retailers have long known that intelligence is the real competitive edge. But while digital channels have benefited from instant data for years, physical stores have lagged behind with outdated tools. Ambient IoT changes that by embedding visibility directly into the store’s fabric.
The payoff is more than operational efficiency. With continuous visibility, stores can act with the same speed and precision as digital platforms while offering the tactile, human experience of in-person shopping. Instead of playing catch-up, brick-and-mortar can reclaim an advantage: matching ecommerce in intelligence while delivering the immediacy and discovery only a store can provide.
In this model, the store is no longer a static space. It becomes a living system: one that sees, understands, and adapts the moment a shopper walks through the door.
Giampaolo Marino is SVP of Strategy and Business Development at Energous, where he is spearheading the company’s strategic growth and market expansion efforts in wireless power and Ambient IoT. He brings over two decades of global leadership experience across the semiconductor and IoT industries, with a strong track record of driving innovation, scaling business operations and forging high-impact partnerships. Marino holds an MBA in Corporate Entrepreneurship, Marketing and General Management from Babson College’s Franklin W. Olin School of Business, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University. He is fluent in Italian and English, with professional proficiency in Portuguese and Spanish.
