Long before the digital product passport (DPP) was discussed in Brussels, the Düsseldorf start-up Retraced was already working on an answer to a practical question: How does a brand credibly show what is in its product? Since then, Retraced has built a platform to help fashion brands collect and communicate supply chain data.
On the occasion of the DPP, which will be mandatory for clothing and textiles from 2027, co-founder Lukas Pünder explains in an interview why the real challenge lies less in technology and more in trust.
What motivated Retraced to focus on the DPP early on, even before it became mandatory?
Retraced actually arose from a completely different problem. The story begins with Cano, a shoe brand with which Philipp Mayer and I wanted to bring Mexican Huaraches to Germany. Production took place under fair conditions and the leather was vegetable tanned. But how do you communicate this credibly? We wanted our customers to be able to scan the shoe to digitally see who made it, how it was made, where the materials came from.
There was no suitable solution. So we built them ourselves. This laid the foundation for Retraced. That was in 2018, years before the DPP was even an issue in Brussels. Our starting point was therefore not compliance, but the belief that consumers have the right to know what they are buying and that brands that can demonstrate this have a real advantage. For us, the digital product passport was an instrument of proactive transparency right from the start.
What challenges were there initially and what are they currently?
At the beginning we had to explain a lot: How can a brand communicate transparency to consumers? How does this pay off economically? At that time, that was still a “nice to have” for many people.
Today, regulation has settled the discussion. The challenge is different: How do you build reliable data across four or five supply chain stages? Many brands know their Tier 1 delivery operations well. What happens behind it, at spinning mills, dye works and raw material suppliers, is often still a black box. That’s exactly where the real work lies and the bigger the brand, the more complex the supplier network becomes and the more a transparency solution has to be scalable and efficient.
What data gap did you discover when mapping multi-stage supply chains?
Most brands audit their Tier 1 suppliers, but many risks, such as environmental violations or poor working conditions, hide further down the chain and often emerge late.
The structural problem behind this is that each stage of the supply chain has its own formats, its own certification schemes, its own way of documenting or not documenting data. Proprietary formats and silos make it difficult to combine or compare data across schemes, actors and regions. There is no common data model for multi-certification scenarios in multi-tier supply chains. We are building exactly this shared infrastructure. With over 30,000 suppliers in our network, we are already well on the way to achieving this.
How do you motivate delivery companies and customers who are hesitant to disclose information about their production facilities or other relevant data?
Hesitation almost always has a specific reason. Delivery companies are often afraid that transparency will make them vulnerable to competitors, auditors or brands, who then exert price pressure, for example. You can’t solve this with a nice onboarding brochure. What really helps: build trust before demanding data. This means clarifying who has access, what happens to the data and what doesn’t. And it means starting with delivery operations that are already open so others can see that transparency is not a trap.
Our argument is pragmatic: If you enter data cleanly into Retraced once, you don’t have to reprocess it for every new brand. Suppliers exchange verified product and material data once, stay synchronized with buyers’ requirements, and reduce repetitive tasks through a single collaborative system. This is not a favor to the brand, but rather saves the delivery company itself time and resources.
For the brands themselves, the motivation is usually a mixture of pressure and calculation. Regulation will come one way or another as the DPP becomes mandatory in 2030. Anyone who starts now will build up the data basis step by step. If you wait, you buy yourself stress.
At what point in the manufacturing process is the digital carrier actually assigned – during fiber processing or only after the garment is finished?
This depends on the product type and the maturity of the supply chain. The clear recommendation is: as late in the process as possible, at item level. One must decide whether to identify products at the item, batch or model level and plan how this ID will appear on the product, ideally as a 2D barcode such as QR codes that can coexist alongside today’s commercial barcodes.
Assigning the QR code at the fiber processing level makes little technical sense because too many production variables are still open in this way. What is realistic is the assignment after completion of the garment, on the hanger or in the label, at a point in time when the product ID is stable and can be linked to all stored supply chain data.
How can we ensure that the digital ID remains intact and readable even after years of washing or heavy use?
The DPP makes the product data accessible via a digital carrier, with QR code, NFC chip or RFID all being possible in principle. QR codes are currently considered the de facto standard for the DPP because every smartphone can read them without a special app. RFID is more suitable as a supplementary carrier for logistics, not as primary access for consumers. NFC chips are an interesting interim solution, more robust than printed codes but more expensive per unit.
What is crucial, however, is that the durability of these data carriers over several usage cycles is an open standardization issue that the delegated legal act has not yet resolved. So we don’t yet know exactly what the EU will ultimately prescribe. What we know: The actual data is not in the code, but in the data system behind it. The carrier is just the key. This means that even if a QR code fades after years or a label needs to be replaced, the product passport remains intact. The challenge is physical, not digital. Here we work a lot with the label manufacturers because they have more experience in this area than we do.
Regarding certified materials, how does the new module help automate the management of transaction certificates?
Let’s take GOTS certified cotton as an example. The Scope Certificate confirms that a factory is certified. The transaction certificate (TC) confirms that the specific delivery actually comes from this certified company. You need both to credibly substantiate a material statement. Today this is usually done via email, as a PDF, stored in a folder somewhere, and when an auditor asks, the search begins.
In the Retraced platform, all documents are automatically collected via the delivery companies. Scope certificates from the production sites and the associated transaction certificates are then in one place with expiration warnings when a certification expires. The TCs are also compared and linked directly to the product deliveries. If the TC does not match the delivery, the system issues a warning. That sounds unspectacular, but in practice it saves an enormous amount of time, in our experience around 90 percent of the work. For many brands, this equates to several weeks of manual effort. This solution closes exactly the gap that causes many accusations of greenwashing today.