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.)
