Chapter 6 — full chapter
| Site: | FashionKIC Learning Platform |
| Course: | Digital Product Passports |
| Book: | Chapter 6 — full chapter |
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| Date: | Sunday, 1 November 2026, 3:20 AM |
Chapter 6 — Beyond Compliance
Introduction
Circular Business Models and Digital Product Passports
Digital Product Passports (DPPs) provide the trusted product information needed to support circular business models throughout the product lifecycle. Reliable lifecycle data enables businesses to extend product value through repair, reuse, refurbishment, resale, and recycling while strengthening collaboration across value chains and improving customer engagement.
For fashion and textile SMEs, DPPs are more than digital records. They provide the foundation for better product design, more efficient resource management, stronger customer relationships, and new service-based business models. By connecting reliable product information with every stage of a product's life, DPPs help organisations transform products into long-term assets that generate environmental, social, and economic value.
This chapter explores how Digital Product Passports support circular business models, improve business performance, and enable organisations to create value throughout the product lifecycle.
Guiding questions
- How do Digital Product Passports support circular business models throughout the product lifecycle?
- How can trusted product information create value for businesses, customers, and other stakeholders? In what ways do Digital Product Passports enable repair, reuse, refurbishment, resale, and recycling?
- How can Digital Product Passports strengthen customer engagement and improve collaboration across the value chain?
- How can fashion and textile SMEs use Digital Product Passports to drive innovation, improve competitiveness, and support sustainable business transformation?
Learning objective Learners will be able to evaluate and sketch circular business models and product-service systems that align with circular design strategies for fashion SMEs.
After completing this chapter, learners will be able to:
- Explain how Digital Product Passports support circular business models by enabling repair, reuse, refurbishment, resale, and recycling.
- Describe how trusted lifecycle information creates value for manufacturers, customers, repair providers, recyclers, and other value-chain stakeholders.
- Analyse how Digital Product Passports improve customer engagement, transparency, collaboration, and product stewardship throughout the product lifecycle.
- Evaluate how Digital Product Passports contribute to business innovation, digital transformation, and sustainable competitiveness in the fashion and textile sector.
- Identify practical strategies that fashion and textile SMEs can use to integrate Digital Product Passports into circular business models and long-term business development.
In this chapter:
- 6.1 Circular business models
6.1 Circular business models
Circular business models change what a fashion company earns from: instead of depending on selling as many new garments as possible, the business profits from keeping products in use — through rental, resale, repair, care and take-back services. These models existed before the Digital Product Passport; what the DPP changes is the economics of trust and coordination that made them hard to scale. Reliable product data reduces the cost of verifying a product’s condition, authenticity and history — the three uncertainties that slow down every second-hand, rental and repair transaction.
6.1.1 From products to services: product-service systems
A product-service system (PSS) shifts value from owning a product to using it. Three families matter for fashion: product-oriented services that keep ownership with the customer (care, repair, alteration and take-back programmes); use-oriented services where the company or a platform keeps ownership and the customer pays for use (rental, leasing and subscription); and result-oriented services, where the customer pays for an outcome — still rare in fashion, but visible in workwear and corporate uniform services that manage garments for a monthly fee.
Each PSS family depends on a specific set of product data. Rental and leasing need an ownership and use log (who has the item, when, and in what condition). Resale needs authentication and condition evidence plus a verifiable history of care and repairs. Repair services need material and construction information plus the parts and patterns to restore a garment. Take-back and recycling loops need accurate composition and substance data so sorters can route each item correctly. These are exactly the data areas Chapters 2 and 3 mapped into the DPP.
6.1.2 Circular business models that DPP data unlocks
Read against the case studies in section 6.4, five model families show what the passport data layer adds:
- Rental and lease models (By Rotation, MUD Jeans “Lease A Jeans”): item identity and a condition/use log let one garment serve many users without repeated re-verification.
- Resale and refurbishment (Patagonia Worn Wear, Vestiaire Collective, Vinted): authenticated history, care records and repair evidence raise buyer confidence and protect resale value.
- Repair and care services: construction, material and care data let repairers and customers maintain garments correctly, extending lifetime and supporting EU repair-friendly policy.
- Take-back and closed-loop recycling: verified composition and substance-of-concern data allow safe sorting and higher-quality recycling — the data chain Chapter 6.1.3 describes for closing the material loop.
- Product-as-a-service / managed wardrobes: for workwear, uniforms and increasingly everyday apparel, monthly-fee models need the same use and care log as rental, at company scale.
6.1.3 Design implications for SMEs
Choosing a circular model is a design decision, not only a commercial one. What the DPP adds is the requirement to decide, at design stage, which data the product will carry through each lifecycle step and who will be allowed to write to it. Three implications matter most for an SME:
- Design for a durable identity: the carrier (QR label or RFID tag — Chapter 5) and the product’s data record should survive the garment’s life, including washing, repair and resale.
- Decide data fields before production: retrofitting data to a finished garment is far more expensive than capturing it at source, where suppliers and factories already hold it (Chapter 3’s weakest-hand-off lesson).
- Keep the passport open, not proprietary: data should be readable by partners, repairers and resale platforms through shared standards, avoiding vendor lock-in (Chapter 5.4).
The result is a different reading of the passport: not a compliance document produced at the end of a process, but the data infrastructure of a chosen business model — which is why Chapters 1.3 and 6.5 describe DPPs as strategic assets.