Fabacus plots route to DPPs
For some years Digital Product Passports (DPPs) were widely regarded as some tech tool that was unlikely to have much impact on retailers and consumers but this suggests a misunderstanding because they are set to play an increasing role in the future.
Highlighting their gradual creep up the agenda and move into the limelight was the recent announcement that Tesco had introduced them across its F&F fashion range with its partner in the initiative Fabacus providing the DPP solution.
Cultural change
The founder and CEO of Fabacus is Andrew Xeni who is also the founder and chairman of Nobody’s Child. This places him in an interesting position of running both a sustainable fashion brand and a tech firm. Having a successful foot in the retailer camp is certainly helping him to build momentum with DPPs as implementing such tech-backed initiatives are invariably about cultural change and he has the benefit of talking the same language as the senior executives to whom he is looking to sell the solution.
The reason the likes of Tesco has made such a move is because of the forthcoming European Union legislation on sustainability. The nuts and bolts of the requirements are “still being polished”, according to Xeni, but they will encompass traceability, environmental impact and integrity of reporting among an array of other things.
DPPs have been likened to nutritional labelling on food items and the plan is that they will enhance supply chain transparency and help combat green-washing in the retail eco-system. To deliver on these requirements they have to handle a lot of information and the chosen route is via a QR code stitched onto the garment or added to a label that takes the shopper to a veritable trove of data behind the product.
Data is the key
This data is the key to the whole exercise. Fabacus is on its fourth generation solution that includes 180 data points and this will continue to grow as newer versions are released. The complexity of DPPs is the large number of stakeholders’ data that is involved – from the retailers, to the manufacturers throughout the supply chain, and then right through to the growers of the raw materials involved in the production process.
“Retailers think they know about this data but they don’t really know what’s required. They might have 15-20 systems in their own organisation and then hundreds of suppliers,” he says.
He likens Fabacus to the United Nations whereby they are bringing a variety of people together from the various stakeholders within the supply chain. At present this involves him talking to the top six or seven retailers and also the big manufacturers. He is leveraging his conversations across the different parties through his position as an independent provider. “We sit in between everybody. We don’t intrude. We can extract data from them in its existing state and put it all together in the format required [for the legislation],” explains Xeni.
Death by a thousand cuts
While he says the manufacturers will suffer a death by a thousand cuts if they don’t partake in the adoption of DPPs it is the retailers that are in an immediately more acute position as they are the ones that have to actually execute and deliver on the forthcoming legislation. Although Xeni says the impending legislation is not designed to kill businesses, and that the deadline for implementation has been pushed back a couple of times – it is early-2027 for clothing – there is a hard-stop of 2030 in place.
He suggests retailers’ view of implementing DPPs as akin to “walking over coals” but tempers this with the belief that there is “treasure at the end of the rainbow” for those who complete the journey. Fabacus positions itself as a provider of a ‘compliant catalogue’ for retailers that helps them with their data-readiness.
“We’re a data pure-play. Data integrity is our strapline. It’s a vigorous process. We create a roadmap for them involving taking a capsule of clothing, doing the plumbing, and then they spread it around their business,” he says.
Embedded in the data
Although Xeni says there are other vendors talking about DPP solutions including those focused on specific verticals many of these are not deeply embedded in the data and are more focused on the front-end user experience, which is much easier to deal with than the complex mashing together of myriad data sources. There will also be examples of the largest retailers building their own proprietary DPP infrastructures.
As well as enabling him to talk the retailers’ own language, Nobody’s Child is also a great platform on which to demonstrate DPPs and highlight what is possible. He expects that by mid-way through next year all the brand’s products will have DPPs.
Although much progress has been made over the past five or six years Xeni admits that there is still much work to do across the supply chain. Things get complicated when you get down to sourcing the relevant data points around fabric, dyes, mills, processing and buttons etcetera. He cites the example of when wood is used for say furniture goods then the GPS location of the tree will have to be included in the DPP. “There are lots of holes in the data. Tier 1 and tier 2 are okay but we’ll need to [ultimately] go to tier 5. We’ve gone to tier 5 with Nobody’s Child,” he says.
Confidence in the future
This certainly sounds like a serious challenge ahead. It is even more so when you consider that 180 billion clothing units are sold each year in the EU and that the likes of Inditex can be releasing as many as 4,000 new products each week.
Despite the work that is required, Xeni says the progress that has been made at Fabacus gives him confidence in the future, which will certainly be welcome by the company’s retail partners and the other organisations in its growing eco-system.
