DPP Introduction: Renoon CEO on challenges and benefits

Operational issues are more likely to cause a bottleneck when implementing a digital product passport (DPP) than the requirements themselves. Who owns the data internally? What budget does it cover? Which delivery companies need to be integrated first? In what time frame? These are some of the questions facing DPP provider Renoon.

The company started as a sustainable fashion app for consumers. Today it specializes in end-to-end DPP infrastructure and traceability for the fashion industry. Product management, traceability and compliance have previously been treated as three separate areas by industry players. However, Renoon sees itself as an end-to-end solution for the deployment of DPPs, offering a cohesive process that combines regulatory expertise, supplier integration, data infrastructure and implementation.

The company works with fashion brands of different sizes across Europe, which is why the implementation challenges are very different. For large fashion companies, they mainly relate to corporate management. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), operational capacity can be an issue. FashionUnited wanted to find out more and spoke to Renoon co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Iris Skrami. Topics included how brands can get started, what some of the data challenges and blind spots are, and how to share data most efficiently.

Can you outline the different challenges depending on the size of the company?

For larger companies, EU regulatory requirements raise specific questions about responsibility and cross-functional coordination. It is also about where the DPP sits within broader digital transformation programs. In these organizations, the first step is typically a business case and internal alignment process, not technology adoption.

Smaller companies have smaller teams and resources are distributed among fewer people. Therefore, the idea of ​​a multi-year transformation program is not realistic. Renoon typically develops a step-by-step plan of action with these brands. It determines where to start, which delivery companies to prioritize and what implementation can look like in the first year compared to the third year. The brands that move the fastest don’t necessarily invest more. They make earlier decisions about responsibilities, the integration of suppliers and their data strategy.

How does the right data drive implementation?

One of the most consistent findings in Renoon’s work is that brands tend to overestimate the amount of missing data. At the same time, they underestimate how fragmented the data they already have is. Product information is located in PLM systems [Product Lifecycle Management, Anm. d. Red.]while operational data on ERP platforms [Enterprise Resource Planning, Anm. d. Red.] are stored for planning company resources. Supplier certifications, traceability and environmental data are managed via a separate layer of processes, spreadsheets and partner portals.

So the information is there. They’re just not connected in a way that would make them auditable, scalable, or structured for product-level product fit. In other words: the data is there, but the infrastructure and interoperability are missing. The real question is often how existing systems, supplier networks and compliance requirements can communicate with each other in a single framework.

What were the initial challenges and what are you currently facing?

In the beginning, the challenge was legitimacy. We asked brands to invest time and resources in something that felt speculative. It was a regulation that had not yet been enforced; a data infrastructure that did not yet exist on this scale and a category of providers that the market had not yet fully identified. Winning early partnerships meant convincing people to move before the majority did.

Now the challenge has been reversed. Consciousness is no longer the bottleneck. We continue to see that brands understand the requirement, but have not yet resolved the internal issues that need to be addressed first. This includes: Who is responsible for it, what budget does it cover, which delivery companies are prioritized and when? The difficulty in decision-making has shifted from “Should we do this” to “How do we actually start?” That sounds like progress, and it is, but it brings with it a different kind of complexity. We are often as much a partner for this coordination as we are a technical partner.

What is the biggest data blind spot in multi-tier supply chains?

The assumption that missing data means no data exists. In almost every implementation we’ve done, brands overestimate how much they’re missing and underestimate how fragmented what they already have is. Product information resides in PLM systems that manage the product lifecycle. Operational data resides on ERP platforms. Certifications, environmental records and traceability documents are scattered across spreadsheets, delivery operations portals and email flows. The data exists, it’s just not connected in a way that makes it verifiable or structured for a product passport at the product level.

“The biggest blind spot in data is the assumption that missing data means no data exists.”

The real blind spot lies at the second and third levels of the supply chain. Brands generally have adequate visibility into their direct manufacturing operations. But the materials, the dyes and the chemical additives come from suppliers from which their suppliers source. That is where the real unknowns lie and where the DPP will ultimately require the most work.

What do you do about delivery companies that are hesitant to share information?

With a lot of patience and a clear distinction between what the DPP actually requires and what brands sometimes require. Suppliers often protect information relevant to competition. This includes the specific processes, recipes or sourcing relationships that differentiate them from others. That’s legitimate. What DPP compliance requires is not its prescription. It requires verifiable characteristics. These can usually be structured in a way that protects protected details while still creating a compliant, credible passport.

Part of our work is helping brands have better conversations with their suppliers. We don’t call this an audit, but rather a common infrastructure issue. Delivery companies that understand that the DPP is coming no matter what and that early preparedness positions them as preferred partners tend to engage differently than those who feel tested.

When is the digital carrier (such as a QR code) assigned in the manufacturing process?

In practice, this varies depending on the application and product complexity. However, the most common approach we see is to assign the carrier at the finished goods level. This typically happens during final production or before shipping. At this point, a stable, unique product identity can be reliably established. Earlier allocation creates challenges in continuity of traceability. A batch of fiber or a roll of fabric cannot be assigned one-to-one to a finished SKU, i.e. a storage unit, especially in cutting and sewing operations with yield fluctuations.

For brands that prioritize deep material traceability, the origin of a particular batch of fiber is important to the DPP claim. In these cases, we work with upstream data links that are retroactively assigned to the passport. The QR code on the garment refers to a product passport, which may contain data collected at several previous points in the supply chain, even if the wearer itself was only applied at the end.

How do you ensure that the digital ID remains readable for years?

This is partly a question of physical durability and partly a question of data architecture, and both are important. On the physical side, the carrier technology itself needs to be specified for the expected life cycle of the product, be it a woven label, thermal transfer or embedded chip. A QR code on a paper tag serves a different purpose than one woven into a care label or encoded into an NFC chip. For products with long or intensive usage cycles, the specification discussion is part of the scope of implementation.

On the data side, the more important question is what happens to the underlying product fit infrastructure over time. The physical carrier is only as useful as the endpoint it points to. Renoon builds the DPP infrastructure with data persistence and URL stability as non-negotiable requirements. A scan in five years must result in a valid, current record and not a broken link. This is less glamorous than the QR code itself, but this is where most DPP implementations will quietly fail if they don’t plan for it from the start.

What motivated you to evolve from a consumer-facing app to a DPP platform?

The honest answer is that the consumer app taught us something we couldn’t have learned any other way: consumers want transparency, but brands control whether it exists. You can create the best product experience, but it will reach its limits once the underlying data isn’t there.

We kept hitting the same limit. It wasn’t a demand problem, but a structural one. The information brands have about their own products is fragmented, unverified, and not designed to be shared at the product level. At some point it became obvious that the more important problem had to be solved upstream. The DPP regulation set a deadline for this work, but the infrastructure gap we were filling existed long before the regulation.

The interview was conducted in writing.