The Data Deficit: Why Fashion Has a Supply Chain Transparency Problem It Can't Spreadsheet Its Way Out of
There is a version of this problem that the fashion industry has been telling itself for years. It goes something like this: our supply chains are complex, our supplier relationships are long-standing, and the information we need exists somewhere — we just need better tools to surface it. Give us the right platform, the right integration, the right dashboard, and the transparency problem resolves itself.
That story is comfortable. It is also wrong.
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. Before the question of which platform to use comes a more fundamental question: what data do you actually have, where does it live, and how much of it would survive scrutiny?
For most organisations in this sector, the straight answer to that question would be uncomfortable.
The evidence is not difficult to find. Studies of digital maturity in fashion and textiles consistently show an industry operating well below the threshold of what its own complexity demands. Manual processes dominate. Spreadsheets remain the primary instrument of supply chain data management in organisations of significant scale. One analysis found that a mid-sized fashion brand manages an average of 37 separate data interfaces — not 37 integrated systems feeding a coherent picture, but 37 points of fragmentation, each requiring human effort to bridge.
That fragmentation has a cost that goes well beyond the hours spent reconciling spreadsheets. It means that data collected for one purpose — a supplier audit, a certification submission, a regulatory report — is rarely available for any other. It means that the same information is requested multiple times, from the same suppliers, by different functions within the same organisation, in different formats, for different systems that will never speak to each other. It means that by the time data reaches the people who need it, it is often out of date, incomplete, or unverifiable.
And it means that when something goes wrong — a supply chain disruption, a regulatory inquiry, a green claims challenge — the organisation discovers in real time just how little it actually knows.
What makes this particularly acute right now is that the external demands on that data are accelerating faster than most organisations are moving to address the underlying problem.
The regulatory environment facing fashion and textiles has shifted materially in the past three years. The Digital Product Passport will require brands to make verified, structured product data accessible across the supply chain and to consumers — not as a voluntary gesture of transparency, but as a legal condition of selling in the European market. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires evidence-based disclosure across the value chain. Extended Producer Responsibility schemes are placing lifecycle accountability on producers that most have never had to exercise before. The Green Claims Directive is raising the evidentiary bar for sustainability claims that brands have been making, in many cases, without the data to support them.
Each of these represents a new demand on data that, for most organisations, does not yet exist in the form required.
The instinctive response is to treat each new requirement as a discrete project: assemble the data needed for this specific report, this specific submission, this specific audit. That approach is understandable. It is also the pattern that keeps organisations permanently behind — perpetually assembling point solutions for requirements that keep shifting, never building the underlying capability that would make the next requirement tractable.
The spreadsheet is not the villain of this story. It is a symptom. Organisations reach for spreadsheets when they lack shared systems, shared definitions, and shared accountability for data. The spreadsheet fills the gap — and in filling it, makes the gap invisible. The work gets done. The report gets filed. The audit passes. And the structural weakness that made the spreadsheet necessary remains exactly as it was.
This is where the real cost accumulates. Not in the hours spent on any individual spreadsheet, but in the compounding effect of an organisation that has never decided to treat its product data as something worth managing systematically. 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 process begins again from scratch.
The fashion industry has been paying that cost for a long time. What has changed is that the external environment is now making it visible in ways that were not previously possible to ignore.
There is a question worth sitting with before moving to solutions. It is not which platform to implement or which supplier portal to deploy. It is more basic than that: does your organisation treat data about its products as an asset — something with value beyond its immediate use, worth maintaining, worth governing, worth investing in? Or does it treat data as a byproduct — something generated in the course of doing other things, useful when it happens to be available, not worth the effort of managing deliberately?
Most organisations in this sector are closer to the second position than the first — even if few would say so out loud. The good news is that this is a choice, not a fate. The less comfortable news is that making a different choice requires more than a new tool. It requires a different understanding of what data is for.
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 Clay Banks on Unsplash