Digital Product Passports at 1,400 SKUs: Nobody's Child Sets the Pace

London womenswear brand Nobody's Child has rolled out digital product passports (DPPs) across 1,400 products, moving from small pilots to full-scale deployment ahead of tightening European regulation. The brand shared its playbook at a preview session for Munich Fabric Start, the twice-yearly fabrics trade show opening in January, where speakers argued that regulatory mandates, DPP requirements and a mounting waste crisis leave the industry no choice but to restructure how it collaborates.

Muchaneta ten Napel, founder and CEO of Shape Innovate and a longtime host of the event, said fashion has built strong tools but has not fixed the system around them. "I think it embraces it for the moment, but doesn't know how to nourish it," she said. "We're changing the way fashion operates by creating these amazing tools, but fundamentally, the system itself hasn't changed." Her prescription starts inside the company, not across it: "Sustainability teams need to speak to designers. Designers need to speak to PR. PR needs to speak to accounting… before you go and try and collaborate with another company, ensure that your house is in order."

How did Nobody's Child scale its DPP rollout?

Head of sustainability Philippa Grogan, who said she did not own a smartphone until 2021, began by building an internal task force drawing representatives from across the business. "We wouldn't be able to know what we were actually putting through the traceability software if we didn't know from merchandising which products are going to be coming in next," she said.

The brand runs its passports on the Xelacore platform from Fabacus, a company that shares a founder and chairman with Nobody's Child. Fabacus adapted product registry technology originally built for global licensing to meet DPP requirements. The platform pulls data from Fairly Made, the brand's traceability software partner, and from internal systems to create a single trusted version of product-level data. It automates information flow from the moment a purchase order is raised, generating serialized QR codes and consolidating formerly siloed sources.

Data completeness remains the brand's own burden. "It's not a light switch in terms of all the data," Grogan said. "If the data isn't there, then there'll be a patchy DPP. So we need to do everything in our power to make sure that everything's as complete as possible."

What did supplier pushback look like?

Suppliers hesitated to share their data. Grogan said she understood why: "Fashion has existed in this smoke-and-mirrors, sort of opaque way for so long, and now suddenly someone's just bossing them around from a laptop in North London." The brand ran back-to-back calls showing supply partners where it sat on the regulatory timeline and the benefits of moving early "without the scary pressures of regulation looming over us."

A second friction point was labelling. Suppliers preferred ordering labels from their own nominated suppliers, but the brand needed a single labelling partner managing all QR codes so the process would not resemble "air traffic control." The lesson, in Grogan's words, was "partnership over prescription." Nobody's Child now promises suppliers an end-of-season report on their traceability scores and life-cycle assessment data, letting them track progress and position themselves as early adopters.

Incomplete product data, she argued, is as "ridiculous as us putting a shirt out with an accidentally missing sleeve." Her working motto: "Learn together, panic together, celebrate together."

Where do new materials break down?

Elsa Parente, co-CEO and CTO of Portugal-based Positive Materials, said the factory floor is the real stress test. "Developing or creating a new material is quite often the easier part of the process," she said. "The harder part is everything that comes after that." Her validations assess four failure points:

• consistent quality across batches that meets brand requirements
• repeatability of manufacturing results
• integration into existing supply chains and infrastructure
• cost, "perhaps the biggest pain point," including price parity with core materials

Brands, suppliers and innovators should collaborate at a "very early stage," she said, with materials adjusted mid-process rather than finished first.

Delvify AI, a materials sourcing platform for fashion and retail, applies the same logic upstream. Founder and CEO Charles Allard Jr. said narrowing material choices before decisions harden is "really the way to sustainability." "The fabric might be perfect, but is the price right? Can you meet the minimum order quantity?… Can you actually get the material you've chosen?" Certificates only matter if teams can source the information early and work from the same data set, he added.

What does the flax sector show about sector-wide traceability?

Marie Demaegdt, textile and sustainability director at the Alliance for European Flax-Linen & Hemp, noted Europe produces three-quarters of the world's flax fibre. The body runs two certifications: Masters of Flax Fiber, guaranteeing European-origin flax, and Masters of Linen, requiring every value-chain stage — spinning, weaving, knitting — to be performed by European companies. She urged firms to test the sector's new digital traceability system now, even with SMEs still onboarding, rather than wait for a perfect chain.

The commercial decision is straightforward: brands that align internal teams, digitise product data and bring suppliers in as partners now will meet DPP and traceability mandates without scrambling later.