Introduction

The fashion and luxury industries are navigating a period of profound structural change, shifting from voluntary transparency to mandatory accountability. While digitalization in apparel was once driven by operational efficiency through the use of NFC and RFID tags for logistics and inventory, the landscape has fundamentally changed. Today, the digitalization of the product is a regulatory necessity designed to combat greenwashing and enforce circularity.

Driving this shift is a generational demand for authenticity. Loyalty has emerged as a key battleground, with 29% of luxury executives identifying experience and loyalty as their strongest growth opportunity. However, for modern consumers, loyalty is conditional. Purchasing a luxury item now often follows months of investigation because shoppers want to know where a product was made, how it was made, and by whom.

Consequently, supply chains have evolved from purely operational infrastructure into a storytelling medium and a reputational asset. Provenance and transparency are becoming as vital as price and promotion, as the notion of value now encompasses origin, ethics, and accountability. Sustainability has shifted from a marketing differentiator into an operational baseline.

The Regulatory Landscape

What is accelerating the shift toward traceability and digital documentation is the tightening of international regulation. A wave of European legislation is fundamentally redefining what brands must disclose, certify, and prove. Sustainability and supply chain transparency are no longer seen as differentiators but as legal and reputational necessities. The emphasis across the industry is shifting from aspiration to accountability.

The two most consequential pieces of European legislation in this regard are the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). Together with a growing body of global traceability mandates, these directives are compelling companies to document, certify, and digitalize their value chains in ways that were, until recently, entirely voluntary.

The CSRD, which entered into force in January 2023, expands the scope of mandatory sustainability reporting to a significantly larger number of companies operating in or selling into the EU. It requires detailed disclosures on environmental, social, and governance matters, including supply chain due diligence, under a standardized reporting framework. For fashion and luxury brands, this means granular documentation of sourcing, manufacturing conditions, and environmental impact across the entire value chain, not just at the finished product level.
The ESPR goes even further. It mandates that every product for which ecodesign measures are adopted will require a Digital Product Passport (DPP), with textiles among the first in scope. The DPP requires that each product carry a digital record containing information about its materials, origin, repairability, and environmental footprint. Accessible via QR code or other digital means, the passport follows a product throughout its lifecycle from production to resale and end of life. This makes supply chain data publicly accessible and verifiable.

The technical infrastructure for this system is entering its final approval phase right now. The European Committee for Standardization is expected to finalize this by March 2026. For the textile industry, this timeline is a clear signal that the specific rules for apparel will be locked in shortly after these technical foundations are settled. Brands must prepare for mandatory implementation by 2027, as the standard eighteen month transition window for full compliance will begin once these final rules are published.

As a direct result, luxury brands will be expected to map their suppliers, certify sourcing origins, and make digital product passports a standard feature of how they bring products to market (Deloitte). This is not a distant requirement: the regulatory timeline is already in motion, and companies that have not begun building the infrastructure to comply are already behind. Supply chain transparency is of particular concern to executives in the US (24%), South Korea (23%), India (20%), and Japan (20%), a signal that the regulatory ripple effects are being felt well beyond European borders.

For many brands, this represents a significant operational challenge. Mapping a supply chain is complex, particularly in fashion, where production is often distributed across dozens of suppliers, subcontractors, and material sources across multiple countries. But it also represents an opportunity. Brands that build robust traceability systems do not merely achieve compliance; they generate the kind of verified, granular product data that younger consumers are increasingly demanding, that resale platforms require to authenticate goods, and that circular business models depend on to function. The digital product passport, in this sense, is not just a regulatory instrument, it is infrastructure for the next phase of how fashion brands create and communicate value.

​​How Brands Are Adapting

Artknit Studios

Artknit Studios is an Italian knitwear brand built around a straightforward premise: that high-quality, sustainably produced garments should be able to prove it. Founded by Alessandro Lovisetto with the ambition of building a new generation of luxury where responsible practices are integrated into the product rather than bolted on as marketing, the brand sells through its own stores in Rome and Milan and through retailers including La Rinascente. Artknit Studios reported revenue of EUR 2,3 million in 2024, up 62% year on year. The brand's values were clear. The challenge was communicating them at scale.

Before implementing a digital product passport solution, Artknit's team struggled to manage, process, and surface supply chain data in a way that was meaningful to the end consumer. The information existed internally, such as sourcing origins, certifications, environmental impact figures. But translating it into something accessible and verifiable on a product page was operationally unwieldy. The gap between what the brand knew about its own supply chain and what a customer could actually discover was significant.

To close that gap, Artknit partnered with Renoon, a technology platform specialising in digital product passports and supply chain transparency tools. The solution was embedded directly into Artknit's product detail pages as an interactive widget. It brings together several layers of information in one place. Claims badges, compliant with the EU's Green Claims Directive, allow the brand to surface verified and declared values alongside the evidence behind them, so consumers can interrogate the proof points themselves rather than simply taking the brand at its word. A supply chain mapping tool traces each product's journey from raw material to finished garment, identifying specific suppliers and their locations. And a lifecycle assessment (LCA) module translates production data into concrete environmental metrics: water usage, CO2 emissions, and water nutrient impact, each benchmarked against a standard product made without responsible materials or local production.

The passport for a typical Artknit product maps a supply chain that spans multiple countries and processes. For example, for a single product linen was sourced from Belgium, organic cotton from Turkey, spinning carried out in both Tongxiang, China and Luisago, Italy, and final knitting and manufacturing in Ponte Uso, Italy. The environmental footprint data attached to that journey is specific. For instance, the brand’s linen cotton bowling shirt uses 3843 litres of water used, representing an 82% saving against the standard benchmark; 6,6 kilograms of CO2 emitted, a 28% reduction; and a 70% saving on water nutrient pollution. These are not aspirational claims, but they are calculated figures, surfaced transparently, and accessible to any customer on the product page.

The commercial results have been notable. Comparing users who engaged with the Renoon DPP against those who did not, Artknit recorded an 8,4% increase in average revenue per user, a 4,62x uplift in conversion rate among first-time visitors, and a 3,19x increase in average time spent on the product page. The estimated return on investment, calculated using purchase data and average order value, stands at 448%. These figures suggest that transparency, when it is specific, verified, and well-designed, does not just satisfy regulatory or reputational requirements but actively drives commercial performance.

For Artknit, the digital product passport has become a way of operationalising the brand's founding values, not as a compliance exercise, but as a direct line of communication between the people who make the garments and the people who wear them. In an industry where trust is increasingly earned through evidence rather than storytelling, that connection is proving to be a meaningful differentiator.

Ganni

Danish fashion brand Ganni has taken a different approach, using digital product passport infrastructure to look deeper into its own supply chain, and to ask harder questions about environmental impact before that information ever reaches a product page.

In 2024, Ganni launched a pilot project in collaboration with EUSPA, the European Union Agency for the Space Programme, to explore how satellite data could help identify the key drivers of biodiversity loss across areas surrounding its suppliers. The initiative, documented in Ganni's Responsibility Report, was facilitated by Renoon, which connected the brand with EUSPA and provided digital product passport expertise throughout. It is the first time Earth observation data has been applied to biodiversity monitoring in the fashion industry.

The startup KANOP analysed landscape and ecological changes between 2017 and 2025 in areas surrounding three of Ganni's suppliers: Ramil and Rodrigues in Portugal, and FMF in Italy, all already involved in the brand's carbon insetting initiatives. Using Copernicus satellite data, the analysis was designed to detect the underlying pressures that drive biodiversity loss: habitat fragmentation, infrastructure development, and long-term shifts in land use and vegetation health, rather than its surface-level symptoms.

The goal is practical as much as scientific. By tracking changes around these supplier sites over time, the pilot has contributed to a set of science-based indicators intended to guide Ganni's future biodiversity strategy, and potentially serve as a reference for the wider industry. The results quantify habitat composition, fragmentation, vegetation condition, and human impact across the studied regions.

Renoon's role extended beyond facilitation. As the pilot progressed, the company explored how satellite-derived biodiversity data could feed into digital product passports, making this kind of environmental monitoring visible and verifiable at the product level. The satellite monitoring phase began in early 2025 and ran until June 2025. The project contributes to the EU Green Transition and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those advancing climate action, biodiversity protection, and responsible production.

The Ganni pilot points to a broader shift in how digital product passport infrastructure is being used. The Artknit case shows that transparency can drive consumer engagement and commercial performance. Ganni's experiment suggests the same traceability architecture can be turned inward, toward the supply chain itself, to generate environmental data that regulation is demanding and that sustainability strategy requires. For both brands, the digital product passport is not simply a disclosure tool. It is how they are choosing to understand, and account for, their place in a longer chain.