There is a particular moment organisations encounter when they move from reading about the Digital Product Passport to actually examining what it would require of them. The regulation, until that point, has been an abstraction — a compliance horizon, a project, a deadline. Then someone asks a specific question: what data do we actually have, for a specific product, that would go into a passport today?

The answer to that question is the mirror. And for most organisations, the reflection is instructive.

A conversation happens with reliable regularity when a fashion or textiles organisation begins a data-related implementation. The scope is defined. The system is selected. The project plan is approved. And then, partway through, the implementation team discovers that the data the system needs to hold has never been properly defined — that two functions are working from different versions of the same information, and that the governance questions the project assumed had been answered were never asked.

Most of the data problems described in this cluster trace back, eventually, to the same place. A function without the evidence to support a claim. A system holding data that nobody owns. A supplier relationship that was never structured to produce the transparency now being asked of it. Follow those threads far enough and they tend to arrive at a sourcing decision — one made on cost and lead time, in a season where margin was tight and the data question was not yet on the agenda.

Procurement did not create the DPP problem intentionally. It created the conditions for it systematically, across seasons, in the ordinary course of doing its job as that job has historically been defined.

Sustainability claims are among the most visible things a fashion brand puts into the world — on product pages, in campaigns, in investor communications, in the retail partnerships that carry the brand narrative furthest from its source. They are read by people with very different reasons for doing so: consumers, journalists, regulators, competitors. Of all the functions that carry exposure from poor product data, Marketing carries the most public version of it.