From Data Points to Data Products: A Different Way to Think About What You Collect
Most fashion organisations collect a great deal of data. They collect it for audits, for certifications, for sustainability reports — for whatever the immediate requirement happens to be. The data gets assembled, the purpose gets served, and then — in the vast majority of cases — the data sits. It is not connected to anything else. It is not maintained. It is not treated as having any value beyond the task that prompted its collection.
This is not negligence. It is a rational response to how data collection has been structured. If data is gathered to satisfy a requirement, then the requirement defines its useful life. Once the audit passes, the certification is issued, the report is filed, the data has done its work. The effort required to maintain it further, in the absence of any system designed to make that easy, rarely seems worth it.
The problem is that this logic compounds quietly. Every reactive data-gathering exercise that substitutes for a data capability is a cost paid twice — once now, and once when the next requirement arrives and the organisation starts again from scratch with the same information it assembled and then let degrade.
There is a different way to think about data. The shift required is conceptual before it is technical — which is part of why it is harder to make than any software implementation.
A data product is not the same thing as a data point. A data point is a fact collected for a purpose. A data product is something managed deliberately: defined, maintained, governed, and made available across the organisation in a form that can be used by anyone who needs it, for purposes that may not have been anticipated when it was first created.
The distinction matters practically. A material composition figure collected for a certification submission is a data point. The same figure — maintained as a live record, linked to a specific product, updated when the supplier changes a material, accessible to Design before the next season's brief and to Legal before a claims review — is a data product. Same underlying information. Entirely different organisational relationship to it.
The shift from data points to data products requires three things that most fashion organisations have not established around their product information.
The first is intentionality — deciding in advance what data is worth creating and maintaining, not just what is needed for the next report. At the point of sourcing a new material or onboarding a new supplier, the question worth asking is what information will remain valuable not just this season but across the product's lifecycle.
The second is continuity. Data collected once and left to degrade is not a product. A product is maintained. It has someone responsible for its accuracy and a defined process for updating it when circumstances change — when a supplier substitutes an input, when a certification lapses, when a manufacturing location shifts. In most organisations, that continuity is absent not because anyone decided against it, but because no one has ever been given the mandate or the resources to provide it.
Finally, reusability. A data product earns its investment by serving multiple purposes. Material composition data that informs a sustainability report, a DPP data field, and a legal claims review is not collected separately for each. It is collected once and maintained in a form that makes each use straightforward. The investment is made at the point of creation and governance, not at each successive use.
The practical gap in most organisations is not a shortage of data. It is a shortage of data that anyone trusts. Ask the Sustainability team whether the material composition figures in the sourcing system match the figures in the last certification submission. Ask Legal whether the sustainability claims on the product pages have been reviewed against current supplier information in the past twelve months. Ask IT whether the figures in the ERP and the figures in the supplier portal are reconciled and, if so, by whom and how often.
Those questions tend to produce instructive answers — not because the organisation has been careless, but because it has been building data points rather than data products. The difference only becomes visible when someone needs to use the data for a purpose other than the one it was originally assembled for.
The DPP makes that difference visible at scale, and under regulatory scrutiny. A passport that requires verified, product-specific, current data — and that will be checked against claims made elsewhere in the organisation — cannot be built from data points. It requires data products: information maintained carefully enough to be trustworthy, structured carefully enough to be interoperable, and governed with enough rigour that the organisation can stand behind it.
That is the shift. Not from less data to more data. From data assembled on demand to data managed as an asset. The organisations that make it will find that the DPP is, in the end, the easy part.
Michael Shea is a digital excellence advisor, non-executive director, and leadership coach working with organisations navigating the human and technical dimensions of digital transformation. He hosts The Aeolian Discourse and writes at The Aeolian.
Photo by Diego Marín on Unsplash