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Madhava Venkatesh Raghavan is CTO and cofounder of TrusTrace, a leading platform for supply chain traceability within fashion and retail.
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There’s nothing easy about it, but I think we agree it’s important, even required: The fashion industry needs a sustainability makeover. By some estimates, it accounts for as much greenhouse gas annually as France, Germany and the U.K. combined. Because the fashion supply chain is so complex and opaque, it’s also hard to identify where all the inefficiency, waste and pollution are coming from.
But we must identify it, not only for the good of the planet but also because consumers demand it—and regulatory bodies are beginning to require it.
In prior articles, I discussed the importance of digitized traceability systems, technology platforms for supporting greater supply chain visibility, as well as secure, shareable data, enabled by blockchain, for establishing a chain of custody across the industry. In this article, I’ll examine how to bring everything together—sharing data seamlessly among traceability systems and other information sources. This will take cooperation across the fashion ecosystem, the adoption of open application programming interfaces (APIs) and standardized data models to tie together solutions.
No single technology provider, brand, NGO or other organization can successfully implement a data-driven traceability system across the entire range of materials and processes involved in manufacturing, distributing and consuming fashion products. They can maybe build one of many networks of supply chain participants to trace a corner of the fashion industry—the market for organic cotton, for example. But unless each of these networks can coordinate and share information with each other, we can’t realize the full benefits of the industry’s disparate efforts to improve sustainability.
We need an open ecosystem of information for traceability and sustainability, built on partnerships, ecosystem development, standardization and open APIs.
Traceability Data, In Aggregate
The main objective of a traceability system at scale is to aggregate information from different supply chain networks so brands can quickly assemble the traceability data that aligns with their sustainability goals and compliance needs across their products. This requires building a standardized set of data models to capture sustainability information (and all ESG data, for that matter), as well as material-related data, that can be shared consistently with the many different participants in the fashion industry.
Currently, most fashion brands have fairly good visibility into their tier 1 and 2 suppliers, even if they haven’t achieved complete digitization of their data, but they collect little information about suppliers beyond tiers 1 and 2. Moreover, there’s often a trader involved at every step between brands and their suppliers, which only complicates the establishment of an interconnected supplier network and the collection of traceability data.
That doesn’t mean there’s zero visibility. Constellations of supplier networks exist with their own limited visibility. When it comes to sustainability, there are third-party organizations that attempt to assess and certify supply chain performance. But to realize a full-fledged traceability system for the fashion industry—one that all participants can benefit from, regardless of their corner of the industry—we should aggregate the data from all these networks, whether its supply chain data from a brand’s traceability platform or third-party data from standards bodies like Textile Exchange, certifying bodies like Control Union and others.
What does all this traceability data include? Typically, the data looks at producer; country of origin; sustainability information about production sites (location, emissions, chemical usage, social and ethical factors); processing methods; material composition; product usage and circulatory info (reuse and recycle, for instance), etc.
Initiatives like the EU’s digital product passport and circularity.ID go a long way toward establishing how fashion data should be standardized inside traceability systems, but that only gets us so far. When standardized data comes out of different traceability systems, exposed through open APIs, it can be shared automatically, creating new sustainability applications and the possibility of near-universal supply chain visibility.
Becoming A Data-First Fashion Industry
Today, APIs are common across the digital world. Online travel booking sites are a good example. They aggregate hotel availability, flight options, prices and much more through APIs. In fact, many tech companies are API-first endeavors; their very business models are predicated on the open sharing of data. It’s just a matter of time before the fashion industry leads with data, particularly in its supply chain.
There are already useful APIs for sharing fashion data, from information about products themselves to materials to conditions at garment facilities. With these APIs, various systems can talk to each other, integrating seamlessly to produce the traceability ecosystem the industry needs to tackle its sustainability challenges.
And this is the tip of the iceberg. A collaborative, traceability ecosystem will eventually include much more, such as data generated by new tracing technology, which includes physical “DNA” markers affixed to products and materials. Or circularity information is generated to help consumers understand the lifecycle of their fashion choices and promote reuse or recycling.
Through an ecosystem of such data providers, all this data can give brands, supply chain partners and customers an integrated picture of the products they make and deliver—all while minimizing the fashion industry’s impact on our planet.
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