GoToTags, the Spokane-based data tag company, has seen strong growth in annual sales and is looking to move to larger facilities here.

The company currently is based at a 2,600-square-foot building at 612 N. Maple, near Kendall Yards.

“We’re growing significantly, probably about to grow out of here,” company CEO Craig Tadlock says. “Most of our customers are global.”

Tadlock says the company likely will move to a larger building in Spokane within the next six to nine months, hopefully somewhere near its current location.

GoToTags sells programmed tags, software, and encoding and reading hardware for nearfield communications, quick response, ultra-high frequency, and radio frequency identification, known respectively by their acronyms, NFC, QR, UHF, and RFID.

The Journal last reported on GoToTags in 2019, shortly after the company moved to Spokane from Seattle, where Tadlock founded it eight years earlier as Wireless Sensor Technologies Inc.

At the time of the earlier Journal report, the company had seven employees and was attracting attention from several Fortune 500 companies interested in ordering more than 1 million tags at a time.

Today the company has 12 employees, including three based at its satellite office in Rossland, British Columbia. Tadlock, who as of last week was about to become a Canadian citizen, has his primary residence there.

He says the company, which surpassed the 100 million tag milestone last year, should have 20 employees to help meet its current demand for data tags and related products.

“We’re trying to hire another seven people here,” he says during one of his recent frequent visits to the main Spokane office.

Data tags, which can be manufactured in the form of stickers, cards, wearable items, magnets, key fobs, and tokens, are used for many purposes, ranging from enhancing customer knowledge of the products to protecting against theft and counterfeiting.

Some tags are manufactured into the lids of high-end beauty projects, which often are stolen and resold through organized crime, Tadlock says.

If such products are stolen and show up on Craig’s List, for example, a manufacturer can buy them and use the data on the tags to track transaction activity, which can be sufficient for the FBI to obtain a warrant and shut down the illicit sales.

Tadlock says most retail items that cost over $100 have data tags attached.

GoToTags, for example, has encoded tags for $55 million worth of wine to combat counterfeiting, he adds.

Walmart now has tags on every item, which is important for inventory control, he says.

“UHF allows real-time inventory tracking,” Tadlock says. “You can walk into a warehouse, wave a wand, and it will tell you everything in there.”

He says mobile contactless payment systems rely on NFC technology.

“We started in 2011, when no one was using UHF, and NFC wasn’t on phones yet,” he says. Now, all mobile formats are NFC compatible.

“The market grew up exactly how we thought it would,” he says.

Blank tags typically are manufactured overseas, and most of GoToTags' revenue is generated through encoding data on the tags to meet customer needs. The price to encode tags starts at 3 cents each for some high-volume customers, he says.

“We didn’t invent the technology,” Tadlock says. “We know how to customize it.”

In the last two years, the company has focused on product and software development, he says.

In addition to tags, the company sells software, data readers, and it even manufactures its own robotic machines that encode the tags.

Its manufacturing operations include in-house metal fabrication, 3D printing parts to precise tolerances, and cutting and soldering proprietary printed circuit board hardware.

“We’re laser focused on lowering costs, so customers don’t have to pay for the machine if they can prove the need,” Tadlock says.

He says encoder machines made by other companies start at $200,000.

“I can’t tell you our cost, but I think my mountain bike is more expensive,” he says.

Each machine, which is about the size of a hefty suitcase and appears somewhat like a large reel-to-reel tape player when operating, can encode 8 million tags per month.

Tadlock anticipates having 10 encoder machines operating full time at the Spokane facility, in addition to providing encoder machines to its larger customers.

The company, which has been profitable for over a decade, raised a venture capital investment of $300,000 several years ago but has turned down all investment since, while annual sales have been escalating, especially post-COVID, Tadlock says.

While Tadlock declines to identify some of the company’s current customers, GoToTags website has previously listed Ford, Exxon Mobile, Sony, Tide, and Microsoft as customers that rely on its technology.

“Most of our customers are big repeat customers,” Tadlock says.

Although GoToTags isn’t the only company that provides such products, demand for the technology is expanding quickly enough that competition isn’t a concern yet, he says.

“The market is growing so much that it’s not about competitors, but whether you can serve the customer,” he says.