Electronic bag tags are ready for takeoff

February 16, 2023

Walking into Sea-Tac Airport for a Friday afternoon flight, GeekWire Co-founder Todd Bishop glanced smugly at the people huddled around the Alaska Airlines self-serve kiosks to print bag tags. “I wouldn’t be wasting my time in that crowd, not on this day,” he said.

“OK, sure, I still had to wait in line to drop off my bag,” Bishop noted, “But my bag tag was attached to my luggage and ready before I arrived at the airport. In fact, it had been on my bag for several weeks, for multiple flights to different destinations.”

That is because Todd was testing an electronic bag tag offered to him by the airline. The 3-inch by 5-inch device, made by the Dutch company, BAGTAG, is powered by near-field communication (NFC) from a smartphone—just long enough for a Bluetooth Low Energy connection to update the E-Ink display (the same technology used in Kindles and other e-readers) when checking in for a flight on the airline’s app.

After that, the electronic tag stays on the screen until it’s updated for your next flight.

Alaska Airlines is the first U.S. air carrier to introduce an electronic bag tag, along with some European and Asian carriers. Alaska Airlines has provided the device to about 2,500 elite Mileage Plan members, and says it plans to make the electronic bag tag available for purchase by all mileage plan members sometime in the first half of this year.

The airline hasn’t said how much it will charge for the electronic bag tag when it rolls out more broadly, but the industry norm is a $60-to-$70 one-time charge.

Below, are the key takeaways that Bishop says he, personally, got from his experience:

The convenience is great, and the technology is cool. I’ve been using one on loan from Alaska for review, and I’m not looking forward to giving it back. I plan to buy one on my own when they’re available more broadly.
Alaska still has some minor technological quirks to work out prior to the broader rollout.
In the short run, a lack of availability among different airlines means it’s not a great solution for people who fly regularly on multiple carriers. Infrequent travelers probably won’t see enough value, either.
However, in my opinion, the electronic bag tag will be worth the investment for many frequent Alaska Airlines passengers (and for regular customers of other airlines as the technology comes to them).
My luggage has arrived consistently (and on time) at my destination. For now, this is primarily a testament to the fact that the E-Ink tags work reliably.

The electronic bag tags do contain an RFID transmitter that could ultimately make it easier for the airline to track and route bags, but that will require infrastructure upgrades at many U.S. airports.

In the meantime, the main selling point of the electronic bag tags is pre-flight convenience. Alaska previously offered a print-at-home bag tag option, but many travelers used inkjet printers to create those tags; which frequently made them unreadable—requiring agents to reprint them, ultimately complicating rather than simplifying matters.

Separately, later this year, Alaska Airlines plans to start letting passengers track bags through the system in its mobile app. But the airline will do this by manually scanning bar codes, and by using sortation systems. This tracking system will work with both paper tags (printed at the airport) and the new electronic bag tags.

In other words, the electronic bag tags are primarily an upgrade for the former print-at-home bag tag program, with the bonus of embedded RFID technology that could enable new tracking capabilities in the future.

Research contact: @geekwire

September 4, 2024

Sizzler is a bit of an anomaly: Despite having shrunk to a fraction of its former size and retreating primarily to the West Coast, it’s a brand that remains a ubiquitous cultural touchpoint—in movies and online, on South Park and Saturday Night Live. And even if you’ve never eaten at one, you probably know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, which collaborated with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a comprehensive brand refresh spanning from its website to its stores, reports Fast Company.

“This brand is weirdly working backwards—it exists within the mind, but not necessarily in the world or in the hand,” Perry says. “It’s the most fun to take the brand that has been beaten up for decades and restore it. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped invent the casual dining chain restaurant. It had its ups and downs over the years, but for an eatery known as much for its endless salad bar (which accounts for 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, a global pandemic was not a great development.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020 and has been building back since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand had lost its way, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He aspired for Sizzler to become a brand not locked in the past, but rather one of Southern California’s regional landmarks, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast.

In addition to losing its way, Perkins discovered that Sizzler had also lost its history, quite literally—there was no robust archive of assets and other ephemera. So he began to do a bit of archaeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing intern on missions to the brand’s storage facility to see what could be dug up.

Prior to launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he originally met Perkins. Once Tavern came on board the project, Perry and Perkins immersed themselves in all things Sizzler—from store walk-throughs to the corporate side of the business—and did a bit of brand excavation of their own, buying up everything they could find on eBay.

In the end, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’s problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“It’s the search for timelessness,” Perry says. “The real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that is taking the old and ultimately making it new—and making it new so that it can continue to work in the future …. If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s really where the good stuff starts to come out.”

A cast of characters

One archival find was a steak-shucking bull character rendered in a Hanna-Barbera-esque style, which they dubbed Ribby Ribeye.

“All great brands have characters,” Perry says. “[Ribby Ribeye] is exactly what embodies a famous Southern California brand from both the midcentury and today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring back.”

Tavern built out a supplementary cadre of characters representing the brand’s other best-known offerings—the cheese toast, the unlimited shrimp, a lobster tail; and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate representing all the goods available at the beloved bar.

For the brand’s fonts, Tavern again turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler had used cuts of Windsor and Caslon Black Swash from its beginning through the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetic, so his team utilized Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (a take on Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a contemporary feel, all the elements are blended with modern messaging and photography.

Tavern was given a mandate not to mess with the logo, so the team only slightly messed with the logo. They essentially cleaned it up—ditching the black background and dialing it back to a single color; refining the type in minute ways, and flattening it out. They also slanted it at an angle to drive home the notion of the brand’s cattle-brand element.

The Sizzler glow-up

Of course, all of these aesthetic updates mirror larger—and perhaps more consequential—changes. Tavern also worked on the restaurant interiors, uniforms, the living “brand” of how workers talk and embody the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you stepped inside any of the competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—in the absence of a logo, you’d probably have no definitive idea of where you were. They all tend to look more or less the same: dark environments, menus with food shot on dark backgrounds, which Perry says doesn’t exactly convey freshness or taste.

So, the team sought to separate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by resurrecting the brand’s ownable red color, aiming for a bright and friendly overall vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be rolling out to physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the rebrand is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is an anomaly. It exists in a space between chain restaurant and steak house, not to mention past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia not feeling dated is to maintain a constant understanding of what is culturally relevant today—and then looking to the brand’s heritage and seeing what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. For now, Perry says, “[After working] on big brands, we get bored of the brand a lot faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think a successful rebrand is.”

Research contact: @FastCompany