The DPP Industry Has a Fatal Flaw: It’s Solving the Wrong Problem
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By Jeanine Ballone | World Collective
There is a growing cottage industry of DPP software companies racing to build the dashboard that will save fashion from regulatory oblivion. Slick interfaces. Brand logos on the client page. Compliance scorecards. Green checkmarks.
And almost all of them are building in the wrong direction.
Here is the uncomfortable truth no one in this space seems willing to say out loud: a Digital Product Passport is not a product. It is an output. It is the last mile of a data journey that begins thousands of kilometres away, in spinning mills and dyehouses and cut-and-sew facilities that most brand sustainability teams have never visited and cannot name.
The entire DPP software market is oriented toward brands. The buyer. The entity that needs to demonstrate compliance to the EU. That makes commercial sense — brands have budgets, brands have urgency, brands sign contracts. But it produces a fatal architectural error: it assumes the data already exists and simply needs to be collected, formatted, and displayed.
It does not.
The Data Does Not Live Where You Think It Lives
Every DPP requires fabric composition, chemical inputs, water usage, energy consumption, dyeing processes, finishing treatments, country of origin at each transformation stage, and — increasingly — lifecycle impact calculations at the material level.
None of this data is generated by brands. Not one data point.
It is generated by suppliers. By the mill that spins the yarn. By the dyehouse that colours the fabric. By the finishing plant that applies the coating. By the CMT factory that cuts and sews the garment.
These are the actors who possess the primary data. And in most cases, they do not have it in structured, digital, transmissible form. They have it in production logs, in handwritten batch records, in ERP systems that were configured fifteen years ago for order management — not environmental reporting.
The DPP software companies are building beautiful front doors on buildings with no plumbing.
Why “Just Ask Suppliers for the Data” Is Not a Strategy
The prevailing assumption across the DPP ecosystem goes something like this: brands will request data from their suppliers, suppliers will provide it, and the DPP platform will structure and display it. Simple. Linear. And completely detached from how global textile supply chains actually operate.
I spent a decade leading global innovation at PVH across the Calvin Klein portfolio. Before that, I built sourcing operations for Otto Versand in Turkey and India. I have sat across the table from hundreds of suppliers in dozens of countries. Here is what I know:
Suppliers will not — and should not — hand over granular production data to brand-facing platforms they do not control.
This is not stubbornness. It is rational self-preservation. A supplier’s process data — their chemical formulations, their energy profiles, their yield rates, their cost structures embedded in production metrics — is their competitive advantage. Asking a Tier 2 dyehouse in Bursa to upload its process chemistry to a platform owned by a brand’s compliance vendor is asking it to commoditise itself.
And yet that is exactly what the current DPP model demands.
The result? Suppliers will do what they have always done with data requests they find intrusive or threatening: they will provide the minimum, they will approximate, they will delay, they will tell you what you want to hear. The DPP will be technically compliant and substantively hollow.
Infrastructure vs. Software: The Distinction That Matters
There is a fundamental difference between building DPP software and building the data infrastructure that makes any DPP possible.
DPP software sits at the brand end. It aggregates, formats, and displays. It needs data
to flow into it.
Data infrastructure sits at the supplier end. It captures, structures, and governs production data at the point of origin — as a natural byproduct of commerce, not as a compliance exercise bolted on after the fact.
This is not a semantic distinction. It is an architectural one. And getting it wrong means the entire European regulatory apparatus for textile sustainability will rest on a foundation of incomplete, unreliable, or fabricated data.
What the industry actually needs is not another brand dashboard. It needs supplier-level data architecture — systems that sit where the data is generated, that suppliers own and control, that produce structured outputs compatible with any DPP platform, any regulatory framework, any market requirement.
The data must be a byproduct of production. Not a homework assignment from a compliance department.
The Uncomfortable Economics
Let’s talk about who pays. The current model places the cost burden on brands — they subscribe to DPP platforms, they pay for integrations, they fund the data collection process. This seems logical until you realise it creates a perverse incentive structure.
Brands paying for DPP compliance will optimise for cost, not accuracy. They will pressure their platform vendors to deliver “good enough” data as cheaply as possible. Platform vendors, competing on price, will build the lightest-weight data collection mechanisms they can. Suppliers, receiving no value from the exercise, will treat it as an administrative burden.
The result is a race to the bottom dressed up as regulatory compliance.
Now consider the alternative. What if the infrastructure that captures and structures supplier data also enables those suppliers to sell more effectively? What if the same data architecture that feeds a DPP also powers demand aggregation — connecting suppliers with new buyers based on verified capabilities, certified materials, and real production data?
In that model, data is not a cost centre. It is a commerce asset. The supplier invests in data infrastructure because it drives revenue. The data is accurate because it is operationally meaningful. And every DPP platform in the market benefits from a shared layer of reliable, supplier-governed data.
That is not a DPP product. That is infrastructure. And infrastructure is what is actually missing.
Who This Threatens
This argument will not be popular with every DPP software company currently raising venture capital on the promise of being “the platform” for fashion’s regulatory future. It challenges the assumption that the DPP opportunity is a SaaS play with brands as customers.
It is not. Or rather — it is not only that. The SaaS layer has value, but it is the visible tip of an iceberg. Beneath it lies the far harder, far less glamorous, far more consequential problem of supplier-level data activation. That is where the infrastructure must be built. That is where the investment must go. That is where the credibility of the entire DPP system will be won or lost.
The industry commentators writing detailed series about “what makes a DPP functional and operational” are doing necessary work. But if those explainers stop at the brand’s desk — if they treat the supplier as a data input rather than a data owner — they are describing the plumbing of a house without mentioning where the water comes from.
What Replaces the Broken Model
I do not write critiques without proposals. Here is what a functional DPP ecosystem actually requires:
1. Supplier-governed data infrastructure. Systems that sit at the production level, capture data as a byproduct of existing workflows, and give suppliers ownership and control over what is shared, with whom, and under what terms.
2. DPP-agnostic interoperability. No single DPP platform should own the data layer. The infrastructure must produce structured outputs — ESPR-compliant, GS1-aligned — that any DPP platform can ingest. Lock-in is the enemy of adoption.
3. Data as a commerce asset. Suppliers must derive direct commercial value from participating in data infrastructure. This means connecting structured production data to demand — enabling verified capabilities to generate new business, not just new compliance reports.
4. Regulation-agnostic design. The EU’s DPP is the catalyst, but the underlying problem is permanent: global textile supply chains generate vast quantities of
unstructured production data that has commercial, environmental, and regulatory value. The infrastructure should serve any regulatory framework, not just the one currently making headlines.
This is what we are building at World Collective. Not a DPP. Not a brand dashboard. A supplier-first operating system that generates the structured, fabric-level data that any DPP platform requires — and that turns compliance readiness into a commercial advantage for the suppliers who actually hold the data.
The question is not whether the industry needs DPPs. It does. The question is whether the industry is building them on solid ground or on sand. Right now, it is sand. And the tide is coming in.
Jeanine Ballone is the Founder & CEO of World Collective, a supplier-first operating system for global textile sourcing. She has 25+ years in global textile sourcing, including senior roles at Otto Versand and a decade leading global innovation at PVH across the Calvin Klein portfolio.
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The current DPP boom is fundamentally misaligned, prioritizing brand-facing software over supplier-owned data infrastructure, resulting in compliance systems built on incomplete and unreliable data.