What’s the challenge?
The fashion supply chain is complex, and achieving full traceability is challenging. However, transparency and traceability are essential steps toward a more sustainable industry and should be at the heart of any brand or retailer’s sustainability strategy. As consumers increasingly demand to know the origins of their clothing and the conditions in which they were made, and as governments implement policies to regulate sustainability claims, the need for transparency will only intensify.
To effectively reduce carbon emissions, water usage, and textile waste, it’s crucial to first measure these impacts. Traceability—and the transparency it provides—is the essential driver that empowers supply chain partners to meet their science-based emissions targets and advance the industry’s environmental goals.
Solutions are split into digital platforms and physical tracers:
Digital Platforms are Blockchain or Cloud-based digital platforms that consolidate supply chain data, provide supply chain mapping and visualisation tools, and perform material and product traceability.
Physical Tracers are tracer technologies that supplement existing site-level and transaction-level verification and have the capability to provide physical/material validation alongside the chain of custody, allowing manufacturers and brands to more confidently verify sustainable product claims.
DIGITAL PLATFORMS
Supply Chain Mapping
Supply chain mapping involves gathering, organising, and understanding the intricate network of suppliers and logistics that enable products to reach customers. In the fashion industry, this process enhances transparency and traceability, supporting sustainability efforts by identifying areas for improvement and innovation.
Product Traceability
Product traceability involves tracking when, where, and how each component of a garment is produced, enabling the entire supply chain to be traced from source to consumer. This transparency enhances visibility and supports improved sustainability governance within the fashion industry.
Digital Product Passports
A Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a digital record providing comprehensive product information, including materials, origins, production processes, and environmental impact. It promotes transparency and traceability, enabling sustainable choices and circularity. DPPs empower stakeholders across the value chain to make informed decisions, supporting sustainability goals in the fashion industry.
Waste Mapping
Waste mapping involves identifying and analysing the sources, types, and volumes of waste within a specific area or industry. Tools like “World of Waste” map global textile waste hotspots, providing data on waste volume, composition, and type to support recyclers and innovators.
Impact Tracking
Impact tracking involves measuring and analysing the effects of initiatives to assess their success and inform future strategies. In the fashion industry, it evaluates the environmental and social outcomes of sustainable practices, guiding improvements and fostering transparency.
C2C & B2B Engagement
C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer) engagement involves interactions where consumers directly exchange goods, services, or information with each other, often facilitated by a platform that connects individuals.
B2B (Business-to-Business) engagement is similar but focuses more on exchanging data, information or resources between businesses.
PHYSICAL TRACERS
Forensic Tracers
Forensic tracers analyse the unique micro-particle composition of natural fibres, such as cotton and wool, to verify their geographic origin without adding substances during production. This method enhances supply chain transparency by confirming the authenticity of raw materials.
Additive Tracers
Additive tracers are substances applied to textile fibres or materials—via sprays, inks, or pigments—to enable end-to-end traceability throughout the supply chain. They facilitate the detection and verification of a product’s origin and journey, enhancing transparency in the fashion industry.
SOCIAL INNOVATION
Worker Empowerment
Worker empowerment in transparency and traceability innovations involves leveraging technology to enhance supply chain visibility, ensuring fair labor practices, and enabling workers to access information about their rights and working conditions. This approach promotes ethical standards and improves labor conditions across the fashion industry.
What do we hope to achieve by working in this area?
Fashion for Good is dedicated to empowering brands, manufacturers, and innovators on their journey to establish comprehensive traceability across the supply chain. As regulatory pressures on the industry grow, our bold ambition is to lead the way in creating a more transparent, accountable, and interconnected fashion ecosystem. By driving collaboration, we aim to identify opportunities for greater alignment within the industry and foster enhanced interoperability among diverse supply chain solutions.
How do we address this area?
Fashion for Good has conducted extensive mapping of the landscape, gaining a thorough understanding of both digital platforms and physical tracers available in the market. We align these solutions with emerging policies and directives, such as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) in the U.S. and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive Proposal (CSDDD) in the EU, ensuring that brands and manufacturers can meet regulatory and compliance demands effectively.
Where beneficial, Fashion for Good facilitates pilot programmes with our brand and manufacturing partners to validate traceability solutions. These pilots are tailored to address specific challenges in the supply chain, either through individual projects or collaborative consortia that test innovations across multiple suppliers and regions. One notable example is our Textile Tracer Assessment project, conducted in partnership with Textile Exchange, which focuses on standardising data for recycled textiles to improve traceability and support sustainable practices.
The solutions in our portfolio have now got over 65,000 suppliers onboarded to their platforms, representing the depth of their solutions at scale.
Relevant Innovators
Satma CE
Satma CE is a web based software that uses blockchain optionally to offer traceability across the waste-to-worth supply chain, including collection, segregation, recycling and processing.
Vaayu
Vaayu is the world’s first automated carbon-tracking software for retailers, enabling businesses to reduce their footprint by providing accessible, real-time data to drive carbon-reduction at scale. By integrating with point-of-sale systems, such as Shopify, and leveraging proprietary AI and machine learning technology, Vaayu draws insights from production, sales and logistics to deliver a tangible solution in the fight against climate change and a more sustainable future for retail.
Made2Flow
Founded in 2019, Made2Flow is a data-driven impact measurement and decarbonisation platform focused on gathering, validating, and analysing supply chain data. It provides brands with transparency on environmental metrics, enabling informed decisions to reduce their carbon footprint.
Lizee
Lizee has developed a reuse management system, enabling any brand or retailer to launch, manage and scale their rental and second hand offer in just a couple of weeks through management of eCommerce and logistics flows through algorithmic processing of data. This contributes towards a circular society by facilitating the rent and redistribution of consumer goods, ultimately reducing demand for virgin materials.
TextileGenesis
Founded in 2018, TextileGenesis™ provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that enables fashion brands and textile manufacturers to ensure reliable, secure, and fully digital traceability of their textiles, from fibre to consumer. By offering fibre-forward traceability for responsible and certified materials and a supply chain discovery approach for conventional ones, the platform helps to guarantee the authenticity and origins of materials across the textile, leather, and footwear industries.
MonoChain
MonoChain have developed a method for fashion companies to connect an individual physical item with a digital twin, based on blockchain, using a low-energy, sustainable form of non-fungible token (NFT). This resolves the problem of deceptive counterfeits, we are exploring the potential for providing fashion consumers with ways to get more value and enjoyment from their wardrobe.
Reflaunt
Reflaunt is a technology company that connects retailers with the second hand market, allowing customers of retailers to resell, donate or recycle their past purchases in a click through various resell interphases. Their core product is the “smart button” (plug in) which integrates itself into customer accounts on a retailer’s e-commerce and allows customers to push products for resale on a network of third party platforms specialised in second hand resale to extend life of products and divert from landfill.
PlanetCare
PlanetCare has developed a microfibre filter to be integrated in domestic and commercial washing machines that can capture microfibres before they are released in wastewater. Their technology reduces microplastic pollution in oceans and drinking water.
Save Your Wardrobe
Save Your Wardrobe (SYW) offers a digital wardrobe management platform powering intelligent recommendations and a proprietary digital booking of aftercare services to enable circularity for the post purchase journey. Through these AI powered recommendations and connections with an ecosystem of aftercare services, SYW promotes product life extension thus reducing demand for virgin materials.
circular.fashion
circular.fashion develops services and software for circular design, reuse and closed loop recycling to enable a transparent flow of information between material suppliers, fashion brands, consumers and recyclers. This ensures future reuse, reselling and recycling at the highest possible level of sustainability.
Haelixa
Haelixa offers a DNA-based traceability solution that enables brands to mitigate supply chain risks and secure brand trust. By applying unique DNA markers directly to raw materials, Haelixa ensures full traceability from fibre to finished garments. The certificates seamlessly integrate with all digital traceability platforms, enabling brands to adopt the solution with ease.
Credibl
Credibl is a leading end-to-end track and trace solution using blockchain, AI and Cloud Computing to help brands and manufacturers to digitise sustainability practices. Through real-time data, efficiency and storytelling, they bridge the fragmented gaps between the different sustainability systems of farmers, manufacturers and brands.
BlockTexx
BlockTexx is a textile-to-textile recycler that has developed the technology S.O.F.T.™ (which stands for ‘separation of fibre technology’) that combines chemical recovery technology and advanced manufacturing to produce recycled materials (rPET pellets and cellulose powder) from textile waste.
TrusTrace
Founded in 2016, TrusTrace offers a market-leading platform for supply chain traceability and compliance that enables brands and suppliers around the world to standardise how supply chain and material traceability data is captured, digitised and shared.
Bext360
Founded in 2016, Bext360 offers a SaaS platform that digitises global supply chains for agricultural commodities. By leveraging AI, blockchain, and mobile app technology, it provides comprehensive traceability, enabling transparency and accountability throughout the supply chain.
The Renewal Workshop
The Renewal Workshop takes damaged inventory and returns and processes them into Renewed Apparel, upcycling materials, or feedstock for recycling. Data is collected and shared with partners to help them improve design, production and impact. The Renewal Workshop operates a zero waste circular system that recovers the full value out of what has already been created to help brands reduce waste, recover value, and profit in recommerce. In 2021, The Renewal Workshop was acquired by Bleckmann who still offer the same services in the US.
VeChain
VeChain is a blockchain-enabled product management platform which secures product data enables retailers and manufacturers to easily collect, manage, and share product data across the supply chain all the way to the end consumer. The company uses a Smart Tag system to connect physical products with the physical world, facilitating transparency throughout the supply chain and product lifecycle.
EON
EON’s core technology is an Internet-of-Things platform which digitises physical garments and gives them a Digital ID, enabling all parts of the end-of-use supply chain to access key product and material information. By sharing real time data on product material contents and dyeing, production and distribution details, there is enhanced understanding of a product’s impact and enables data-exchange across circular value chains.
&Wider
Founded in 2014, &Wider is dedicated to improving working conditions across global supply chains by monitoring human rights impacts. The company leverages mobile technology to enable workers and smallholders to report on their working conditions regularly, fostering meaningful stakeholder engagement.
Reverse Resources
Reverse Resources is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that enables the fashion industry to collaborate on moving textile waste to recycling and close the loop of its own raw materials. It offers a single point of access for sourcing and supply chain set up of textile waste for the textile-to-textile recycling sector, enabling mapping and measuring volumes of waste by type, composition and location enabling waste suppliers to provide high quality waste for recyclers.
PurFi
PurFi rejuvenates pre-consumer textile waste back to virgin quality fibres virgin quality products from corporate waste streams to create a closed loop solution. The technology can process cotton, PET, cotton/poly blends as well as separate out elastane.
Good On You
Founded in 2015, Good On You uses the power of consumer choices to create a more sustainable future. As the world’s leading source for sustainability brand ratings, Good On You gives retailers the tools and credibility to engage with conscious shoppers on the issues they care about. Building on its expertise in fashion, Good On You launched its beauty ratings in October 2024 to further its mission to use consumer power to drive industry change.
Trove
Trove offers a service allowing brands to take control of their resale marketplaces through a white-label technology and end-to-end operations that power circular shopping. This extends the life of products and provides an outlet for unsellable returns.
Common Objective
Common Objective have created an online B2B platform that matches fashion professionals with connections and resources to drive sustainable practices in areas such as sourcing.
Oritain
Oritain uses forensic science to test the geochemical composition of a material, which is unique to the place it is grown. The detected isotopes and trace elements are interpreted to produce an “Origin Fingerprint” which gives information from where the commodity came from enabling traceability at any point in the supply chain.
reGAIN app
reGAIN app offers a digital solution allowing brands and retailers to outsource take back programmes, with customers who donate and recycle their post-consumer waste offered rewards and discount as benefits. Through the app users can drop off unwanted clothes at national locations (UK), and the reGAIN team taking care of the reverse logistics with donated clothes either resold or recycled thus contributing to a circular society.
Relevant Resources
Explore tools, news, reports, and insights at the forefront of creating a positive future for the fashion industry.
In Conversation with TextileGenesis: The Innovator Creating Transparent Supply Chains
What is transparency?
From Fibre To Finish To Scale: Tracing Viscose And Beyond
Blockchain: Unlocking Transparency and Traceability in The Fashion Supply Chain
A major recent breakthrough in the traceability space occurred with the creation of the Aura Blockchain Consortium – whose members include LVMH, the Prada Group and Richemont (owner of Cartier). The Consortium operates as a non-profit, luxury-specific blockchain technology platform with the goal of developing passports to ensure authenticity and traceability of the brand’s products. The passports offer lifecycle tracking, proof of origin, and protection of intellectual property after being given a unique digital identity based on a non-fungible token (NFT).
FAQ's
What’s the difference between transparency and traceability in fashion?
- Traceability refers to the ability to track each component (fibre, material, process) of a garment back to its origin, enabling a full chain of custody.
- Transparency means openly sharing the “where, when, how” of each stage of production, from raw material sourcing through manufacturing to retail, across the value chain.
Why are transparency and traceability essential for sustainable fashion?
- They provide the foundational visibility needed to measure, manage, and reduce environmental and social impacts across the supply chain.
- As consumers demand more accountability and regulations tighten, brands must be able to verify claims and comply with policies.
What technologies enable traceability?
- Digital platforms such as blockchain or cloud-based systems support supply chain mapping, data visualisation, and verification of material flows.
- Physical tracers, including forensic or additive tracer technologies, validate the material itself (e.g. micro‑particle signatures, embedded markers) to strengthen proof of origin.
How do digital product passports (DPPs) fit into this?
What are the main barriers to implementing full traceability?
- Complexity of global, multi-tiered supply chains with many informal or opaque nodes
- Fragmented data systems and lack of interoperability between platforms
- Cost and technical risk, especially for smaller suppliers and manufacturers
- Ensuring data integrity, verification, and preventing fraud or greenwashing
How do traceability innovations account for social dimensions (e.g. labor, worker rights)?
Transparency tools can include social data (worker conditions, wages, certifications), and some innovations embed worker empowerment mechanisms so that workers can access information and feedback channels.
What are good first steps for brands or manufacturers wanting to improve traceability?
- Start mapping the supply chain (tiers, geographies, material flows)
- Pilot a digital traceability system and/or tracer technology in a sub‑segment
- Demand interoperability and standards alignment (so your traceability data can interact with others)
- Engage suppliers, provide capacity support, ensure data governance
- Align with emerging regulatory requirements (e.g. EU corporate due diligence)
What’s the potential business value of transparency & traceability?
- Strengthened brand trust and consumer confidence
- Compliance readiness for regulation and reducing litigation risk
- Enabling circular business models (reuse, repair, resale)
- Improved supply chain risk management, resilience, and sourcing decisions