There is a particular kind of organisational conversation happening right now in boardrooms and leadership teams across the fashion and textiles industry. It tends to go something like this: we need to get ready for the DPP. What do we need to do, and by when?

It is a reasonable question. It is also, in a subtle but important way, the wrong one.

The transparency problem in fashion and textiles is not primarily a tooling problem. It is a data problem — which is a different thing entirely. Tools can only surface what exists. They cannot create structure where there is none, verify claims that were never substantiated, or connect information that was never linked in the first place.

Every garment that leaves a factory carries more information than the label sewn into its collar. It carries the origin of its fibres, the names of the mills that processed them, the chemicals used in dyeing, the countries through which it passed, the workers whose hands assembled it, the carbon generated in its making. That information exists. It was created at every stage of production. The question is not whether the story is there. The question is whether anyone in the organisation that sells the product can tell it.