Over the past year, I’ve delved deep into fashion’s supply chain, visiting more than 50 farms and factories to report on the evolving landscape around Made in Italy and Made in the UK labels. As I uncovered the sprawling nature of industry supply chains and the rarity of single-origin garments, a question began percolating in my mind: is it possible to build a fully traceable outfit?
A few weeks ago, I invited nine brands to tell the stories of their supply chain traceability journeys through a single garment. Each label had a different approach, and chose to focus on a different material, so the final outfits (we ended up with two) showcase a wide array of both challenges and solutions. Some brands are working directly with farmers to trace natural fibers back to their single origin, while others prefer aggregators with “batch traceability”, where products are traceable to a small group of suppliers. Some are exploring high-tech traceability solutions, while others are still operating across Excel spreadsheets. Some have fully fledged digital product passports (DPPs) already live on their e-commerce sites, and others are still working out how to turn traceability into transparency.
The result is a patchwork playbook you can pick and choose from, depending on the size of your business and the scope of your traceability ambitions. Whichever approach resonates most, traceability is increasingly time-sensitive. As the participating brands point out, the European Union (EU) is working fast to implement DPPs, and traceability is the linchpin that makes compliance possible. After all, if you don’t know where your products come from, how can you communicate that to consumers, or make improvements along the way?
Collaboration is key
When Tamanna Mullen started building Arth Atelier two years ago, her plan was to create a fully traceable brand. It should be easy, she thought. Starting from scratch, she wouldn’t need to pivot an existing supply chain, made increasingly complex by years of offshoring, diversifying and racing to the bottom. But Mullen’s optimism soon dissipated. “I realized very quickly that full traceability is extremely hard to achieve,” she explains. “Part of the problem is that the system is set up in favor of mass production.”
Taking wool as her starting point, Mullen approached established fabric suppliers, hoping they could help her trace her products back to the farm level. But, as a fledgling independent brand, she was unable to meet the respective suppliers’ minimum order quantities. And when she turned to combing mills, scourers and farmers, with the aim of building her own supply chain, she ran into the same volume problem — but this time, at every stage. Eventually, she settled on a middle ground: working with aggregators that emphasize transparency and traceability. For wool, that meant forging a partnership with Nativa, a company that uses blockchain technology to certify and trace every stage of the production process. This allowed Mullen to trace the wool to a small group of regenerative farms in Uruguay. (Aggregators gather materials from multiple sources and sell them on to brands. Some give little reassurance about the source or practices used; others, like Nativa, allow brands to trace their products to a small selection of certified sources, if not the individual source.)
Arth Atelier isn’t the only brand using strategic partnerships to accelerate traceability. Since 2021, Reformation has been working with textile traceability platform Fibretrace to trace around 50% of its denim supply chains. “It’s a good example of something we have been able to push beyond a pilot, because the goal is to find solutions and technologies that can scale and become part of how we operate,” says Reformation’s chief sustainability officer and VP of operations Kathleen Talbot.
The supply chain starts at the Good Earth Cotton farm in Australia, which uses regenerative agriculture practices and is owned by Fibretrace co-founders David and Danielle Statham. Before being transported to the Wathagar Ginning Company, the cotton is sprayed with a physical traceability pigment, which can withstand production processes from spinning to weaving and dyeing, allowing it to be scanned and verified at each stage of the supply chain. “One of our big challenges was finding a durable way to trace fibers that doesn’t wash out and isn’t an adhered label,” says Talbot. “The fact that it’s embedded into the fiber itself gives us a lot of assurance and is why we’ve continued to scale with Fibretrace.”
Getting suppliers on board
When I reported our Made in Italy series last year, Gruppo Florence-owned hatmaker Facopel told me it was running 16 different work stations to accommodate the five different traceability operating systems dictated by various brand partners. This situation isn’t uncommon among suppliers. The fashion industry has yet to decide on a single standard for traceability, and the EU is still working out exactly what DPPs need to include and how. For brands prioritizing traceability, getting suppliers on board can be half the battle.
“It takes suppliers who are values-aligned and willing to go through extra steps to adopt these practices,” says Talbot. “For brands, it’s about asking: what does your vendor engagement look like? How do you really bring them along? How do you correct any incentives or malincentives if it’s harder or more expensive to do? If your supplier has been doing the same thing for a hundred years, it’s going to take a lot of negotiation and change management.”
In this way, traceability is not a technology challenge or an infrastructure overhaul, but a relationship-building exercise, says Gonzalo Pertile, VP of sustainability at New York-based brand Theory. “We start with people, not paperwork. Traceability happens in partnership with cross-functional teams, and you won’t achieve anything without support that extends all the way from vendors to top management. When you trust the people you work with, you are more open to sharing information.” Theory has been working with some of its suppliers for two decades, including Italian mill Botto Giuseppe, whose founder introduced the brand to Congi Farm in Australia, which now supplies the regenerative wool for its Atelier Wool coat.
Longstanding relationships like this are foundational to traceability, says Orlagh McCloskey, co-founder and creative director of London-based womenswear brand Rixo, which just celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Rixo says it is currently working with suppliers to digitize its traceability data and certificates, moving from Excel spreadsheets to the Intertek and Trace For Good systems. Having a proven track record and consistent orders helps to get suppliers on board with these changes, McCloskey explains. “We have only worked with one supplier since we started the brand, and I actually worked inside their company for a bit. When you’re actually inside the factory, you can see how damaging it is if brands make fickle decisions, and how much that can impact waste. So having visibility of production has been a priority for us.”
Minimizing waste is one of the Rixo’s priorities, adds McCloskey, and it’s a prime example of how close collaboration with suppliers — enabled by traceability — can accelerate other goals. For the most part, Rixo uses digital printing to reduce its environmental impact, but sometimes, such as on its bias-cut scarves, it has to use placement printing. Having a direct relationship with the supplier allowed McCloskey to tweak her design and length of the scarves to cut wastage, something that would have been lost in translation. “You need that visibility and flexibility with your suppliers to work on solutions together.”
Going direct to the source
Many natural fibers are sourced through commodity supply chains, where aggregators and auctions make it difficult to trace fibers back to their farms. “Often, fiber from multiple farms gets mixed into one yarn for logistical and financial reasons, so the best option we have found is buying through certifications,” says former Mother of Pearl creative director Amy Powney, who launched affordable luxury label Akyn earlier this year with a limited fiber basket. “This is still complex though, and we’ve had firsthand experience of certification rules not being adhered to.”
Increasingly, brands like Theory are building direct relationships with farmers to overcome these challenges. In the UK, British Pasture Leather (BPL) is part of a broader movement to reconnect fashion with farmers. Since 2020, co-founders Alice Robinson and Sara Grady have been tracing British leather back to the farm level, creating the infrastructure that will hopefully help to distinguish regenerative leather from more environmentally destructive practices. “Livestock agriculture is practiced across a great spectrum of approaches and that’s obviously a huge flashpoint for brands using leather,” says Grady. “Tracing the hides back to the farm level means we can bring distinction to farming practices that have positive impacts.”
BPL works with a small group of British farms certified under Pasture for Life, but it doesn’t trace individual products to individual farms as of yet. Instead, it operates on a batch traceability model, explains Grady. The bag featured is an iteration on Been London’s Calvert tote, which was sold in limited quantities as part of BPL’s Made With campaign, reimagining the hero products of 10 British brands in British leather. Been London founder Genia Mineeva, who works primarily with waste materials, asked for the parts of the hide typically considered “undesirable”, including the suede, belly and shoulder pieces.
Jewelry brand Monica Vinader is taking a similar approach to gemstones. In 2022, the brand launched DPPs with 50 of its bestselling styles and set up a program called Mine to Market, which traces its gemstones. “The jewelry industry is incredibly complex and quite opaque; fraught with human rights challenges and biodiversity issues. Gemstones in particular come from all over the world and the supply chain is very artisanal, with a lot of middlemen involved,” says chief product officer Megan Shearer. Other materials had quicker fixes for traceability — switching to recycled gold and silver, and lab-grown diamonds — but the brand has only managed to trace 52% of its gemstones to their mine origin.
A bright spot is aquamarine, which Monica Vinader sources from Zimbaqua, a Zimbabwean mine owned and operated by women. “It’s been a long and slow process to trace our gemstones, and frankly, there are some people we just haven’t been able to convince that this is the right thing to do. So we’ve focused on finding like-minded partners with the same ambition,” says Shearer. Still, the process wasn’t without hiccups. Despite scouting around for an existing audit framework or certification that was fit for purpose, the brand was forced to create its own, working with a human rights specialist and SGS Certification Services. After a few minor tweaks — such as enshrining existing annual leave and maternity leave policies in writing — Zimbaqua passed. The brand has since expanded the framework to turquoise and green onyx, with hopes to scale across gemstones in the near future.
Not content with tracing its supply chain, some brands are building their own. Among the frontrunners is Spanish footwear and womenswear brand Miista, which is building its second factory in A Coruña, Galicia. Producing as much as possible in-house also gives Miista better oversight of labor conditions, says Miista founder Laura Villasenin. “When you work with outside factories, they often outsource parts of the process to factories or countries where labor is not as well regulated.” This has long been the Achilles heel of Italian luxury production, a battle that recently entered the public domain. “I feel comfortable knowing that we know what we’re producing, how we’re doing it and who is doing it, and we can open the doors to anyone that is happy to pass by.”
.JPG)
From traceability to transparency
Traceability is the bedrock of so many sustainability initiatives, but it’s not the end goal.
“Traceability shouldn’t be confused with impact, but it’s essential for setting and maintaining rigorous fiber and production standards, as well as designing for circularity and end-of-life solutions,” says Reformation’s Talbot. It can also be the starting point for supply chain transformation, adds Pertile, pointing to Theory’s partnership with Congi Farm, which is exploring the potential of seaweed tablets to reduce methane emissions from sheep.
Much of this takes place in the background, but at some point, brands will need to turn traceability into consumer-facing transparency. “Traceability shouldn’t live in spreadsheets or documents. It should be a customer experience,” Pertile says. “It’s always a challenge, breaking down complex sustainability topics into digestible information that our customer can process and understand. Hopefully, DPPs will allow us to bring to life all the work we have done on the backend.”
But how do you tell complex stories about supply chains without consumers switching off? And how do you balance elevated, brand-aligned storytelling with regulatory compliance? Powney, for one, says she is “anti-QR codes” because “it’s too much data for people to take in”. Similarly, Reformation doesn’t share product-level data on e-commerce product pages because it’s so hard to get accurate data to that level, even between different washes of the same jeans, according to Talbot. “We’ve found that on-product storytelling is typically more accurate and reflective of that exact product,” she explains. “So we do have some swing tags and labels with content around Fibretrace, which you can scan and it leads you to the Fibretrace landing page on our website.”
Some brands are cautious about sharing their traceability process publicly, for fear of competitors encroaching on hard-won supplier relationships and pushing suppliers beyond their capacity. But this isn’t a fear Pertile shares. “If a brand wants to understand where their competitors are making products, they can find a way to get that information. They can go to the factory and see which other brands are on the production line, or they can check Open Supply Hub. From my perspective, our customer needs to know the story of our products and that’s why we want transparency.”
Some brands and producers — including BPL — are trying to bring traceability stories to life by offering field trips and studio tours, either to other industry players or to consumers. Others are using the product itself to tell the story. Secondhand retailer Beyond Retro recently released the Walulu — a riff on the viral Labubu, except it’s made from upcycled denim in the shape of a whale, because textile waste is a “whale of a problem”. Beyond Retro founder Steven Bethell’s way of saying that “the medium is the message”.
The limits of traceability
Sometimes, the supply chain has blind spots that a single brand cannot overcome alone.
Beyond Retro sources post-consumer denim waste through its parent company Bank Vogue, one of North America’s leading traders of used goods. As a result, it has a reasonable amount of traceability from collection onwards, but there are still blind spots, says Bethell. Bank Vogue owns a remanufacturing facility in the Kandla Special Economic Zone (KASEZ) in India, and each incoming shipment is audited to make sure it only contains post-consumer textile waste from the US, he explains. “The biggest superpower we have is that we own the ecosystem, which makes supply chain traceability a lot easier,” Bethell adds. “But I can’t be very specific about which part of the US it came from, or which specific charity retailer we collected it from. I can just tell you they came from a big pot of unwearable jeans.”
Beyond Retro can make around 25 Walulu keychains for each pair of jeans they reuse. The keychains are then stuffed with old pillows — “the amount of old pillows is insane,” says Bethell — and the trims are new. “I wish I could figure out how to pull poppers off and reuse them, but I’m not that smart. Sometimes, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze,” he quips.
The same sentiment is often applied to trims. Theory — which is owned by Fast Retailing, alongside Uniqlo and Helmut Lang — sources trims, buttons, zippers and linings through a list of nominated vendors, pre-approved by its parent company, says Pertile. These vendors are listed on the bill of materials (BOM), which are created for each product. But many brands, including Reformation, don’t yet trace these smaller components. “We get as much information as we can, but we don’t go into the same level of diligence for anything that makes up less than 10% of the garment,” says Talbot. “It’s a long-term roadmap item, but we’re just not there as an industry yet. So for denim, we’re not looking at the rivet or some of the metal supply chains beyond Tier 1, but a pocket lining might trigger a deeper chain of custody review.”
Despite these challenges, the progress is tangible. Had I posed the same question — is it possible to build a fully traceable outfit? — 10 years ago, the answer would have been a resolute “no”. But it was surprisingly easy to find brands that are working on traceability today, albeit to different extents.
