Change doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
That was the overwhelming message from a recent taster session of the upcoming Munich Fabric Start trade show, which kicks off in January.
While the fashion industry is making considerable efforts to push for progress, said Muchaneta ten Napel, founder and CEO of Shape Innovate and a longtime host of the twice-yearly event, the environment it has created is not conducive to transformation.
“I think it embraces it for the moment, but doesn’t know how to nourish it,” she said. “And I’ve come to the conclusion that the system needs to change. We’re changing the way fashion operates by creating these amazing tools, but fundamentally, the system itself hasn’t changed.”
The industry may not have any choice in the matter, however. Stricter regulatory mandates, the arrival of digital product passports and a mounting waste crisis are converging to force brands and manufacturers to adapt. And while much has been made about the importance of collaboration, fostering it within their organizations is a necessary first step, ten Napel said.
“Sustainability teams need to speak to designers. Designers need to speak to PR. PR needs to speak to accounting. Everybody needs to collaborate in that company because they have the same goal,” she said. “So before you go and try and collaborate with another company, ensure that your house is in order; that you are headed in the same direction.”
That was what Nobody’s Child, a London-based, B Corp-certified women’s wear brand, did when it moved from small pilots to rolling out digital product passports across 1,400 products. To manage the scale of the project, head of sustainability Philippa Grogan, who admitted she did not own a smartphone until 2021, began by setting up an internal task force with 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.
It also helped that Fabacus, whose Xelacore platform Nobody’s Child employs, shares a founder and chairman with the brand. The company took its product registry technology, originally developed for global licensing, and tweaked it to meet the DPP requirements.
By drawing on data from Fairly Made, Nobody’s Child’s traceability software partner, alongside information from the brand’s internal systems, Fabacus was able to create a single, trusted version of product-level data. Today, the platform automates the flow of information from the moment a purchase order is raised, generating serialized QR codes and consolidating data from formerly siloed sources.
“We’ve had to realize that it’s not a light switch in terms of all the data,” Grogan said. “Fabacus has done a fantastic job of setting up the framework for us, but then actually for us to do the paint-by-numbers, that’s an us problem. And 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.”
There were, naturally, stumbling blocks. For one thing, suppliers were hesitant about sharing their data—a concern that she both understood and had to allay.
“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,” Grogan said. “It’s quite a lot for them to navigate. We did back-to-back calls where we showed our supply partners where we were on the regulatory timeline, and the benefits of getting ahead now, without the scary pressures of regulation looming over us.”
It’s often the factory floor where the real stress test begins, as Elsa Parente, co-CEO and CTO of Positive Materials, a Portugal-based sustainable textile innovation and manufacturing company, put it.
“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.”
While startups and universities are often chock-full of new ideas, moving them from lab to scale isn’t always smooth going.
“During these validations, we assess different topics: whether they can be produced at the right quality to match brand requirements; whether they can be manufactured repeatedly with consistent results across different batches; whether they can be integrated into existing supply chains so we can still use our current infrastructure for new fibers or dyeing techniques; and, of course, the cost—which is perhaps the biggest pain point—to see if we can reach price parity with their core materials,” Parente said. “These are some of the main areas where innovations struggle and can fail.”
Success can come, however, when brands, suppliers, manufacturers and innovators collaborate at a “very early stage,” she said. A material does not need to be “finished” before partners are brought into the conversation, either. Positive Materials often invites brands to “join the journey” so they can use the process as a validation for themselves. If the material needs adjusting, that can happen during this process, speeding up adoption, Parente said.
“Collaboration is bringing everyone across the supply chain together to the same conversation,” she added.
Delvify AI, an AI-powered materials sourcing and management platform purpose-built for fashion and retail, facilitates collaboration by replacing the messy reality of relying on random emails and spreadsheets to make sourcing decisions. Instead of scrambling to find physical swatch cards or key sustainability certificates, teams and suppliers can share collections, mood boards, material specifications and other essential information directly within the platform.
Giving sourcing teams the information to make the right decision the first time is “really the way to sustainability,” said Charles Allard Jr., Delvify’s founder and CEO.
“You don’t need your team to find the perfect material, but you need to narrow the choices down a little bit,” he said. “What we’re working with is this iterative process at the very beginning of your workflow, before you’ve decided everything, before you’re generating those QR codes for your DPP. The fabric might be perfect, but is the price right? Can you meet the minimum order quantity? What about the sustainability credentials? Can you actually get the material you’ve chosen?”
Another important question for Allard Jr.: Can a company support the claims it makes about its products?
“Sustainability expectations are increasing,” he said. “Certificates and supplier credentials absolutely matter, but only if the relevant information can be found and assessed. It doesn’t matter how long you take putting these things together. You’ve got to be able to source them early and quickly. You want people to be able to work from the same set of data.”
Collaboration can also be industry-wide, said Marie Demaegdt, textile and sustainability director at the Alliance for European Flax-Linen & Hemp. Europe, for example, produces three-quarters of the world’s flax fiber, representing a significant leadership position.
The organization has developed two certifications: Masters of Flax Fiber, which guarantees that products are made with flax fiber of European origin, and Masters of Linen, which requires all stages of the textile value chain—including spinning, weaving and knitting—to be performed by European companies.
Much as Parente suggested, Demaegdt urged companies using flax and linen to start testing the sector’s new digital traceability system immediately rather than waiting for every part of their supply chain to be perfectly onboarded.
“Even though we’ve set everything up so the tool feeds downstream traceability to the brands, we know there are a lot of SMEs out there—so there are probably still people in the value chain not yet onboarded or just beginning,” she said. “With a step-by-step approach, I think it would be very good to start trying this digital traceability right now.”
But the course of true transparency never did run smooth. Nobody’s Child learned this firsthand during its transition to digital product passports, when suppliers preferred to order labels from their own nominated suppliers.
What the brand needed, however, was the simplicity of a single labeling partner managing all the QR codes so the process wouldn’t end up like “air traffic control,” Grogan said. While things eventually worked out, the situation underscored the need for the sustainability team to be more closely integrated into the general production “critical path,” ensuring data was collected smoothly without delaying product launches.
For Grogan, this was a lesson that “partnership over prescription” was the best policy and that suppliers should be treated as partners in the transition, not as a means to an end. To help suppliers overcome their reluctance to open up their data, Nobody’s Child promised them an end-of-season report on their traceability scores and life-cycle assessment information, allowing them to track their progress and, equally important, position themselves as early adopters.
It’s taken a while, but people are also starting to get the message that incomplete product data is as “ridiculous as us putting a shirt out with an accidentally missing sleeve.”
“Learn together, panic together, celebrate together,” she said. “And let them see what you see in the cool interfaces, so they get excited as well. It feels like there’s a bit of solidarity with our supply partners because they’re always looking for ways to make things a bit more efficient and user-friendly for them.”
