The technology disclosed here encodes a clothing item ID as an alphanumeric code within the clothing item, such as within a radio-frequency identification tag. A clothing item cleaning appliance, such as a cell phone, or a washing machine reads the clothing item ID from the clothing item, and retrieves the care and content information from a database maintained on a cloud. For example, the care and content information can include operating settings of the washing machine. The washing machine can adjust its settings and wash the clothing item in accordance with the care and content information of the clothing item. The care and content information stored in the database can be organized in optimized data structures enabling efficient responses to received queries, and efficient updates to the information stored in the data structures.