Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are rapidly becoming a regulatory requirement for fashion brands selling into the European market. Designed to improve transparency, traceability, and sustainability, DPPs will require brands to provide verified, product-level data about materials, manufacturing, environmental impact, and end-of-life considerations.
For many organisations, the question is no longer if DPPs will apply, it is whether their current systems can actually support them.
Why DPP Readiness Is an Operational Challenge
DPP compliance is not a labelling exercise. It requires continuous, traceable data across the entire product lifecycle, including:
Fibre composition and material sourcing
Supplier and factory provenance
Chemical and process compliance
Production lots and quality outcomes
Repair, recycling, and circularity data
If this information lives in disconnected PLM systems, ERP platforms, supplier portals, spreadsheets, and third-party tools, generating accurate, product-level passports at scale becomes extremely difficult.
Most brands today can report sustainability metrics at an aggregate level. DPPs, however, require SKU- and batch-level evidence, tied directly to operational transactions.
The Four Foundations of DPP Readiness
To support Digital Product Passports, fashion companies must first build four operational capabilities:
1. Unified Product and Material Data
Bills of materials, certifications, and material attributes must be complete, version-controlled, and linked to finished products, not stored in static documents.
2. End-to-End Traceability
Brands must be able to trace each product back to production orders, factories, and material sources, including subcontractors where applicable.
3. Digital Chain of Custody
Production, quality, and logistics transactions must be digitally captured, time-stamped, and auditable to prove where and how products were made.
4. System-Driven Reporting
DPP data must be generated directly from operational systems, with data lineage and validation, not assembled manually for compliance reporting.
Without these foundations, DPP programmes remain fragile, expensive, and difficult to scale.
Measuring Readiness Before Regulation Hits
Many organisations are investing in sustainability reporting tools, but these platforms alone cannot solve traceability or data integrity challenges.
Before pursuing DPP solutions, brands should assess their operational ESG readiness, including:
Supplier and factory visibility
Lot and batch tracking in production
Auditability of ESG metrics
A structured readiness assessment highlights where process, data, and system gaps will prevent effective DPP deployment, and where targeted investments can deliver the fastest impact.
Turning Compliance into Competitive Advantage
Brands that prepare early for Digital Product Passports gain more than regulatory coverage. They unlock better inventory control, reduced compliance risk, improved supplier accountability, and stronger consumer trust through verified product claims.
DPPs ultimately reward organisations that treat sustainability as an operational capability, not a reporting exercise.
The brands that succeed will be those that connect people, products, and processes into a single digital thread, thereby creating transparency not just for regulators, but for the entire business.
Use the form below to learn more about BlueCherry Suite.