Imagine you’re a fashion supply chain director tasked with taking back and recycling 30% of the garments you sell to meet ESG goals. You find the ideal textile-to-textile recycling business to partner with, but they can process the collected garments only if there is detailed raw material composition data available for every item.
Without a high degree of supply chain transparency, you can’t hit the button on this vitally important project. Consumers and your shareholders will be disappointed. And you may fall foul of incoming environmental legislation if you don’t get your data visibility in order very quickly.
Where do you start to unlock end-to-end transparency across your supply chain?
Fashion brands in this situation need to implement a traceability program. This requires supply chain professionals in the company to trace back and collect information about the origins, composition, manufacturing processes and supply chain journeys at each step of the value chain. A data platform will securely hold the data, and can be updated in real time as new suppliers and garment designs come on stream.
When starting to unlock this end-to-end transparency, it’s important to ensure data authenticity and consistency, while guaranteeing suppliers’ independence and data protection.
Everything in the data pool for each garment should be transparent to customers – and increasingly regulators - with a user-friendly end-to-end data platform. Big challenges for brands include achieving supplier buy-in, making data available to the market, and reconciling available data in a clean way, even if it comes from ill-managed or non-harmonized supplier databases.
It will help to team with a technology partner who knows the apparel industry and has market-ready systems in place. Avery Dennison supports brands on their journey to supply chain visibility with our Digital Solutions portfolio. This is an end-to-end digital ecosystem capable of delivering transparency, and the vital communication of data. It combines digital triggers for garments (including QR codes, NFC tags and RFID) which enable Digital Product Passports (DPPs), our atma.io connected product cloud platform (see below), and a range of applications.
Together, these tools give brands access to a world of smarter consumer engagement, improved supply chain visibility and a more accountable, traceable and circular approach to fashion. Once set up with these solutions, you can help track your garment’s journey at every step, manage your compliance with new environmental regulations, and begin closing the circularity loop.
These three elements of our integrated portfolio make this possible:
Digital triggers
QR codes, RFID and NFC tags, Digital Watermarks and Data Matrix CodesCloud-based data systems
Our atma.io connected product cloud platformApplications
Our wide range of apps help to unlock circularity, consumer engagement, supply chain visibility and more
Meet atma.io, connected product cloud by Avery Dennison
Greater fashion circularity is only going to be possible if brands embrace digital technology and data analytics to transform their supply chains.
Data or product cloud platforms are being developed to store all the information that brands will need to prove their garments are carbon efficient, and can be sold on or processed by textile-to-textile recycling facilities.
Avery Dennison’s connected product cloud is called atma.io. It is already helping leading brands, including Gap Inc. and adidas, achieve their connected product vision. atma.io is a platform that unlocks the power of connected products by assigning unique digital IDs to everyday items, providing end-to-end transparency by tracking, storing and managing all the events associated with each individual product — from source to consumer and beyond to help enable circularity.
By leveraging Avery Dennison’s suite of digital ID technologies and atma.io, brands can now more easily trace all raw materials, match POs and lot numbers, link sustainability certificates and help manage compliance. atma.io more closely connects brands not only with their consumers and resellers, but also with textile sorters and recyclers, as well as the upstream suppliers.
Brands can store and contextualise product data, leveraging unique digital IDs to provide item-level intelligence and end-to-end transparency
It’s possible to see where, how and by whom each garment was made
Brands can track carbon emissions across product lifecycles
Raw material composition data, and details about the manufacturing process and supply chain stages can all be stored on atma.io, and used to extend the lifecycle of the garments
Brands can create efficiencies by tracing all raw materials to finished products with just one click
Brands can use products as direct communication channels to interact with consumers, share insights, and establish transparency, loyalty and trust.