How will the Digital Product Passport support resale and authentication?

The Digital Product Passport will support resale by giving each garment a scannable record of what it is, what it is made of and where it comes from, so a resale platform can list it faster and with more trust. It can support authentication if the passport is tied to a unique item and carried on a tag that is hard to copy. The EU passport itself is designed for sustainability and compliance data, so brands that want resale benefits have to design for them deliberately.

What is the Digital Product Passport for textiles?

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) entered into force on 18 July 2024. The European Commission describes the DPP as a digital identity card for products, components and materials that will store information to support sustainability, promote circularity and strengthen legal compliance, accessible to consumers, manufacturers and authorities. The Commission has also launched a DPP registry.

Product specific requirements come through delegated acts. According to an overview by Carbonfact, the delegated act for textiles is expected to be adopted in 2027, with a transition period of at least 18 months, so obligations would apply from 2028 onwards. A draft study by the Commission's Joint Research Centre proposed around 50 data points, covering product identification, material composition, environmental footprint, durability and recyclability, recycled content, care and repair instructions and certifications. The passport will be accessed through a data carrier such as a QR code on the label.

How does a product passport help resale?

Resale is slowed by missing information. A seller often does not know the exact style name, season, composition or original price, and the platform has to research, photograph and describe each item. A passport that a platform can read removes much of that work.

There is early evidence for the speed benefit. In February 2023, Chloé launched digital IDs with technology provider EON on products from its Spring/Summer 2023 collection, using NFC tags or QR codes, and linked them to an 'instant resale' service with Vestiaire Collective. A report by BCG and Vestiaire Collective states that the partnership reduced resale time by over 60 percent.

Read also

How do you collect DPP data from tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers?

Can the Digital Product Passport authenticate luxury goods?

Consumers would like it to. In the BCG and Vestiaire Collective survey published in October 2025, 70 percent of buyers and 67 percent of sellers said authentication through a product passport would be valuable, and 68 percent of buyers valued product specifications. But awareness is low: 65 percent had never heard of DPPs.

Whether a passport authenticates depends on design choices that the regulation does not settle for every product:

• Item level or model level. A passport linked to a product model tells you what a style should be, not whether this specific bag is genuine. Authentication needs a unique identifier per item.
• Data carrier security. A printed QR code can be copied onto a counterfeit. Tamper resistant NFC tags or cryptographically secured identifiers make copying harder.
• Ownership and history. Resale benefits from a record of ownership transfers, repairs and authentication events, which goes beyond the sustainability data the EU requires.
• Access rights. Some data (for example production site or batch) may be restricted to authorities or authorised partners, while resale platforms need a defined level of access.

What data should brands prepare now?

1. Assign a unique, persistent identifier to each item or at least each production batch, and decide on the data carrier.
2. Consolidate product attributes (style, colour, size, composition, care) in the PIM so the passport draws on one source.
3. Link supply chain data (materials, processing steps, production country) from suppliers, which the textile requirements are expected to need.
4. Keep original imagery and descriptions available after a style leaves the range, because resale listings need them years later.
5. Define an access model: what consumers see, what resale partners see and what remains restricted.
6. Agree with resale partners on how they read and write events (resale, repair, authentication) to the item record.

What are the open questions and risks?

The textile delegated act is not yet adopted, so exact data points, carrier requirements and access rules may change. Investing in a proprietary resale passport now risks a second migration later. The safer approach is to build on standards based identifiers and a clean product data model that can feed both the regulatory passport and resale use cases.

There are also costs and dependencies. Item level tagging adds cost per unit, which matters more for low priced goods than for luxury. Passports depend on data from suppliers that brands do not always control. And a passport only helps resale if platforms actually read it; brands should test the integration with at least one resale partner before rolling tags out across ranges.

Read also

Textile Digital Product Passport timeline: what is decided and what is open in 2026

Who benefits most from a resale ready passport?

Brands with high value, long lasting products, where counterfeiting and authentication costs are significant, are most likely to see a return on item level passports in the short term. For mass market brands, the main near term value is likely to be data quality for listings and recycling, with authentication a secondary benefit. In both cases, the work that matters most (clean product data and unique identifiers) is needed for regulation anyway.