Best EAS Tags for Garments

EAS tags play a critical role in the successful implementation of an effective EAS system for clothing retailers. Many EAS tags are designed to be versatile, but it's still important to find the tag that is best suited for each item. Different products come with different levels of risk and require specialized solutions in order to keep your stores safe. CONTROLTEK's extensive portfolio of tags ensures that businesses can properly protect all their merchandise.  

For clothing stores, hard tags can make a big difference in terms of garment security. But to maximize the positive impact, loss prevention experts should aim for the best tag/garment compatibility possible. Here are some of our suggestions for how to tag different common items sold at clothing stores: 

General Purpose

Items like t-shirts and pants may not be as pricey as that new leather jacket featured in the display window, but for the impulsive amateur shoplifter looking for an easy swipe, they’re an ideal target. Therefore, clothing stores need to be serious about protecting these rudimentary but highly popular garments. That’s where the ShrinkBuster tags can offer a lot of help. Perfect for general purpose application, the ShrinkBuster™ and ShrinkBuster™ Mini have high detection rate and are easy for employees to apply and remove. With a sleek design, these tags are great for stores looking to ensure that products are tagged in a way that’s not only safety-boosting, but cost-efficient as well. 

Shoes

Because of their design, shoes don’t seem to lend themselves to tagging as easily as other merchansize. But in fact, tagging them is as easy as finding a solution that can fit through shoelace holes and other small openings. The answer to that is MiniStick™, whose light and small construction enables them to be easily attached to otherwise challenging items like shoes. Bonus: MiniStick tags also work great for accessories like handbags. 

Expensive Garments (leather jackets, coats)

Not all thieves are amateurs. Some are career criminals who aren’t looking to shoplift for the thrill of it or the desire to have a new item, but are instead focused on a singular task: reselling their stolen goods. For these shoplifters, expensive items like leather jackets are often the most lucrative targets, since they offer the greatest potential value when reselling. To protect these items, clothing stores should affix them with exploding ink tags, like the InkGuard™, which deny thieves the benefit of reselling a pricey item by covering that item in ink when a removal of the tag is attempted. 

Sunglasses

Sunglasses are an ideal target for thieves. They are small, easy to conceal, and due to their size and shape, are very often not tagged. To properly tag sunglasses, you need an EAS tag that is secure but unobtrusive to a customer looking to purchase a pair. CONTROLTEK understood this challenge and developed two tags that are ideal for protecting eyewear: QuickOptical™ and OptiTag™. Both tags were designed to be securely attached to eyewear, but still all for comfortable customer try-ons. 

Leathergoods

Small leather goods, like wallets and small bags, were traditionally challenging to protect with an EAS system. Traditional pin tags would cause too much damage to the leather, so most retailers resorted to securing wallets behind a locked case. FlatGuard™ was designed to be a super-slim and sleek, one-of-a-kind alarming tag for securing wallets and other small leather goods. It will alarm if someone walks through EAS pedestals as well as if someone tries to remove the tag without first deactivating it.  

Here at CONTROLTEK, we understand that EAS tags are a vital part to a successful EAS system, which is why we have developed an industry-leading tag portfolio to ensure that we equip our customer to comprehensively defend all merchandise.