You look in the costume shop and find the perfect white shirt. It’s the right size, and it’s time to move on. You want to assign the shirt to the actor and move on, so you search for white shirt in ShowGOAT, and the worst thing happens: 62 white shirts are found in the database. Which one is this one?
Hopefully you gave the shirt a unique ID. Hopefully you can see it on the tag or on a label or a scannable RF Tag. Hopefully there is something here to make this white shirt different from the 61 others.
Uniquely identifying items is the key to keeping your sanity. There are several ways to ID your items. The hard way is to make up letters and numbers and hope they are unique. The easiest way is to buy a roll of pre-printed labels with unique ID’s on them. But if you are handwriting ID’s, you can use Show GOAT to make sure they are unique. You can generate the next available number. For example, when generating the first number on a costume item, ShowGOAT will return the number 1. The second item will be number 2. And so on. It’s simple and repeatable, and everything will be unique.
If you want, you can add a prefix. Maybe you want all your hats to start with the prefix H or HAT. Enter in the prefix HAT, and the first generated ID will be HAT-1.
ID’s can be anything you want. Nothing will stop you from setting “WhiteShirt” as the ID. But it is helpful to have a strategy. Relying on numbers, or prefixes and numbers, makes it easy to quickly generate an ID and move on to something more interesting.
Every prefix you create can be reviewed when creating new item ID’s, so you don’t have to remember. Just be descriptive. If you use “H” for Hats, what will you use for Headdresses? Maybe “HAT” is better.
The best news is you can search for items using the ID.