The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is expected to become a key element of the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), aiming to make product information more accessible to the consumer.
While the final delegated act for textiles is expected in 2027, apparel and footwear brands are already preparing. Building reliable product-level environmental data across complex supply chains takes time, and early preparation allows brands to establish the systems needed to generate accurate and scalable Digital Product Passportssyst.
Carbonfact’s DPP solution has been developed in close collaboration with apparel and footwear brands. Because the platform is built specifically for fashion, new features can be shaped directly around data and regulations specific to the apparel and textile industries.
In this article, we highlight how three of Carbonfact's customers – Fusion Sportswear, Promod, and Coverguard – are approaching DPPs from different perspectives. All three brands selected the LCA-based Digital Product Passport, prioritizing environmental impact data as the foundation of the DPP.
Fusion Sportswear, a Danish sportswear manufacturer specializing in high-performance endurance apparel, is one of the early adopters actively co-developing the Digital Product Passport features with Carbonfact.
For Fusion, the DPPs are not limited to future compliance requirements. The objective is to make product-level environmental data accessible to customers and to operationalize transparency as part of the brand experience.
Fusion came with ambitious and concrete expectations for DPP features – including a consumer-friendly interface, product journey transparency, and clear indicators of manufacturing locations, such as country flags – making the brand a strong design partner.
Fusion already uses Carbonfact for product LCAs and company-wide carbon accounting. Generating DPP outputs directly from the same system ensures:
One source of truth: Environmental impact data remains consistent across reporting and communication channels. That reduces mismatches like “marketing DPP says X” while the internal LCA says Y.
Faster updates at scale: DPP content isn’t a one-off export; it will need ongoing updates (methodology updates, more primary data, etc.).
No additional integrations: Since Fusion Sportswear already runs its product LCAs and carbon accounting through Carbonfact, DPPs can be generated directly from the existing dataset. This means the brand does not need to build new integrations between multiple systems (for example, PLM, ERP, LCA software, and a separate DPP tool).
Troels Vest Jensen, CCO at Fusion Sportswear, shares:
“Together with Carbonfact, we started the Digital Product Passport journey and co-developed ambitious features that enable Fusion to share product-level environmental information with our customers, which will also be a part of the upcoming European Union regulatory requirements. The best part is that Carbonfact is a great tool, and we use it for carbon accounting, environmental reporting, product LCAs – and now DPPs. All in one place.”
Today, Fusion Sportswear is among the first brands to embed Carbonfact’s Digital Product Passports directly on their website for customers.
See a DPP for Fusion’s Long Tights here:
The Digital Product Passport generated through Carbonfact includes:
16 PEF environmental indicators: Displays comprehensive environmental impact metrics aligned with the EU Product Environmental Footprint framework, covering carbon, water, energy, and 13 other indicators.
QR code & link generation: Each product gets a unique URL and downloadable QR code that can be generated with a few clicks.
Granular impact breakdown: Shows environmental footprint broken down by process step, component, and material, helping consumers understand where most emissions occur in the product lifecycle.
Customizable brand content: Includes sections for brand description, sustainability values, and product care guides, allowing you to tell your sustainability story alongside the data.
Certification: DPP solution includes a section showing all relevant certifications for the product, such as GOTS and others.
Eco-score display: Selling in France? Carbonfact’s Digital Product Passport can display the French Eco-Score as part of the DPP output.
The final delegated act for the textiles and apparel Digital Product Passport is expected in 2027. However, preparing for DPP remains technically complex even before the requirements are finalized. Promod, a French women’s fashion retailer and Carbonfact customer, therefore sees clear benefits in starting preparation early despite the delayed compliance deadlines.
In our recent webinar, Benjamin Tessier, Quality & Sustainable Development Coordinator at Promod, outlined several reasons why the brand began preparing for DPP early:
Improved product design: Structuring product environmental data allows brands to identify emission hotspots and product improvement opportunities before mandatory data becomes visible to consumers.
Building product-level environmental data takes time: Collecting, cleaning, and structuring environmental data across complex supply chains and large product catalogs is a long process. Brands that wait for final DPP requirements risk non-compliance penalties.
Stronger supplier collaboration: Preparing for DPP encourages closer relationships with suppliers, for example, by collaborating on data collection or on-site initiatives such as renewable energy adoption.
Improved customer relationship: Easily accessible environmental information enables brands to communicate their decarbonization efforts more clearly and strengthen trust with customers.
Additionally, Promod sees DPP as a structured way to communicate product information that, in many cases, is already required under French legislation:
“We have a transparency policy to give more information about what we do and how we differ from other brands. A lot of things that appear in DPPs are already mandatory in France, such as description of the item, composition, certificates to prove better sourcing, and traceability (demanded by AGEC) – this is where we start. In the future, we will measure other impacts, e.g., physical and emotional durability, as soon as we know concrete DPP requirements.”
When brands begin preparing DPPs early, a practical question often arises: if we print DPP QR codes on product labels now and improve or add data later, will we need to reprint all labels?
The answer is no – Carbonfact’s DPP QR code links to a stable product-specific URL, which identifies the passport for that product. The QR code does not contain a fixed snapshot of the passport content. Instead, it is dynamic and always directs users to the most up-to-date version of the DPP page.
This means brands can print QR codes on labels now and continue improving or expanding the passport data later without needing to reprint labels.
Carbonfact’s team is closely monitoring any regulatory updates. When specific data points become mandatory, we will add the required fields to the passport structure. Due to the rich, underlying data foundation, you’ll be well prepared.
Today, brands are approaching Digital Product Passports in different ways depending on their priorities, existing systems, and internal sustainability maturity. There are four common approaches to building Digital Product Passports:
Learn all about these four methods in our DPP Buyer’s Guide here.
Carbonfact’s customers typically prioritize the LCA-led DPP approach. For apparel and footwear brands, the challenge is not generating a QR code itself, but building reliable product-level environmental data across complex supply chains and large product catalogues.
In practice, implementing Digital Product Passports requires several technical steps, from consolidating fragmented product data to generating scalable DPP links and QR codes:
Retrieve and clean data: We’ll ingest all your existing product and supply chain data. Whether it lives in a PLM, ERP, Excel Sheet, or a combination thereof, we’ll consolidate and clean it.
Enrich and fill data gaps: Incomplete data? Not a problem – we’ll find and fill any data gaps. Our smart data engine – trained on extensive primary datasets – automatically fills in missing details such as component weights, dtex, and process-level steps.
Life Cycle Assessments: Once your data is processed, our LCA engine automatically calculates the footprints for each of your products on an SKU level.
Improve data quality: Carbonfact helps you identify emission hotspots and smartly prioritize your supplier data collection.
Bulk generation of DPP links: Carbonfact generates a stable Digital Product Passport URL and the corresponding QR code.
File sharing with label suppliers: These files are shared with label or trim suppliers, who use the QR codes to print them on care labels, packaging, or hangtags.
During implementation, two main questions typically arise: where DPP URLs should be hosted and what level of product granularity should be used.
Carbonfact's platform supports different levels of granularity: a single DPP per style, per colorway, or per individual size variant. The correct choice depends on the data each brand can provide.
On hosting, Carbonfact recommends that brands host the DPP entry URL on their own domain with a redirect to the Carbonfact-generated page, which keeps the brand in control of that entry point over time. For brands that prefer a simpler setup, Carbonfact can host directly.
Coverguard specializes in the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) market, providing head-to-toe protective solutions for a wide range of working environments across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
While regulatory compliance remains an important driver for Digital Product Passport adoption, Coverguard demonstrates that Digital Product Passports can also support commercial objectives.
Most of Coverguard’s clients are B2B, who themselves are developing strong CSR strategies to stay compliant with regulations and, therefore, are requesting information about where the products are coming from and their environmental impact.
In this context, Coverguard is using Digital Product Passport as a competitive advantage to win over customers through data transparency.
Juanita Toro Giraldo, Coverguard’s Product CSR Manager, shares:
“From the start of our collaboration with Carbonfact, we started showing our clients what we were doing. For example, Carbonfact’s visualization tool for DPPs was really important in proving that we have a partner with a good data strategy, helping with our CSR strategy. It helped us to secure our business and sell more products. We are working with B2B clients, and I love the fact that we can export DPP links or even QR codes in Carbonfact.”
Watch the full interview with Juanita Toro Giraldo below:
Read the full case study on Coverguard’s partnership with Carbonfact here.
Carbonfact is the environmental data platform built specifically for apparel and footwear brands. It enables brands to measure product-level environmental impact accurately and at scale using LCAs tailored for fashion supply chains, consolidating data from existing systems and suppliers into a consistent product model and improving accuracy over time through transparent heuristics.
By focusing exclusively on environmental data – the hardest part of DPPs and product sustainability – Carbonfact allows brands to start with a complete solution today while remaining flexible as requirements evolve, reusing the same underlying data across compliance, reporting, and product-level decision-making instead of rebuilding it for each new use case.
Carbonfact's Digital Product Passport
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