Every organisation preparing for the Digital Product Passport eventually arrives at the same discovery. The data needed to populate a credible passport exists — in fragments, across functions, supplier relationships, and systems that were never designed to work together. Sustainability has some of it. Procurement has some of it. Operations has some of it. IT is maintaining the systems that hold pieces of it. Nobody has all of it. Nobody is accountable for it end to end.

There is a version of DPP compliance that is technically achievable without being meaningfully useful. It involves populating a digital passport with data — material composition figures, environmental indicators, supply chain references — that is structured correctly, formatted to specification, and present in the required fields. The passport exists. The QR code resolves. The auditor can see the record.

The data behind it is estimated, aggregated, unverified, or last updated three seasons ago.

Ask most fashion brands how well they know their Tier 1 suppliers — the manufacturers assembling the finished product — and they will point to audit programmes, compliance certifications, and supplier codes of conduct. The picture there is generally tractable. Not always complete, not always current, but navigable. The relationship exists. The commercial leverage exists. The conversation, however imperfect, can be had.

Ask the same brands about Tier 2, the information is thinner, the verification harder, the accountability less direct.

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.

A conversation happens, with reliable regularity, when a fashion or textiles organisation begins to take its DPP readiness seriously. Someone — usually in Sustainability, occasionally in IT — is asked to lead the work. They pull together what they can find. They discover gaps. They go looking for the data that should fill those gaps and find that nobody is quite sure who owns it, or whether it exists in a usable form, or why it was collected the way it was. They escalate.

Two questions arrived this past week, from two different organisations, both actively engaged with their Digital Product Passport readiness. The first: "Do you think there is a reasonable chance the implementation date gets pushed back?" The second, from a different conversation entirely: "It's two years before I need to worry about this."

Both questions are understandable. Neither reflects the situation accurately.

It is worth being generous about how the Digital Product Passport has been understood — or misunderstood — by many of the organisations now trying to prepare for it. The early conversation around the DPP was dominated by its most visible feature: a data carrier, typically a QR code, attached to a product and scannable by anyone in the value chain.

That reading was not unreasonable given what was publicly visible at the time — but it was the wrong one.

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.

Future-Proofing for Interoperability

By The Aeolian

As sustainability becomes a cornerstone of global trade compliance, companies must adopt data strategies that not only meet regulatory requirements but also build trust through secure and verifiable information exchange. Future-proofing digital systems in this context means ensuring that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data is accurate, auditable, and interoperable across borders.

Continuing Upstream the Value Chain

By Michael Shea and Nis Jespersen

As we expand our clothing value chain example, we might also see that there are two sources of yarn going into the fabric production. For the fabric to be organic, its source yarn must also be. So we see here how Organic Conformity Credentials are provided for both.

Navigating the UNTP Digital Product Passport Ecosystem

By: Michael Shea and Nis Jespersen

Digital Product Passports are probably about to become part of your everyday life. Whether because you are based in the European Union, or selling products that are being exported to the European Union. Or simply because you are a responsible consumer, concerned that the material is actually organic and that no child labour was used in the manufacturing