4.2.4 Case Studies

Example 1: The Trace4Value Pilot (Kappahl and Marimekko)

Between 2023 and 2024, GS1 Sweden coordinated a live Digital Product Passport pilot called Trace4Value, working with Swedish and Finnish fashion retailers Kappahl and Marimekko, technology partner TrusTrace, and organisations including the Swedish Institute for Standards and Aalto University.

  • Over 3,000 garments from Kappahl's and Marimekko's collections were tagged with a QR code linked to a GS1 Global Trade Item Number (GTIN).
  • The passport needed to bring together materials information, supplier data, environmental labelling and circularity information — data that sat with different partners, in different systems, using different formats.
  • No single existing system held all of this in one place. Each scan retrieved the relevant data from multiple sources via APIs and assembled it on the spot.
  • The first products carrying a working passport launched in January 2024.

The core challenge was not a shortage of information; the retailers, suppliers and technical partners between them already held most of what was needed. The difficulty was data standardisation and system interoperability — getting data that lived in different partners' systems, in different formats, to connect reliably to a single product record a consumer could scan and trust.

Lesson: Even a well-resourced pilot with a dedicated technology partner and a national standards body found that the hard part of a DPP was not collecting new data, but agreeing a shared structure for data that already existed across the value chain.

Source: GS1 Sweden (2024) From production to sales – digital product passport in textiles. Available at: https://gs1.se/en/case/digital-product-passport-pilot-within-textiles/ (Accessed: 23 July 2026); Trace4Value (2025) Pioneering Digital Product Passports: transforming textile industry standards. Available at: https://trace4value.se/content/uploads/2025/04/Report-Trace4Value-Pioneering-Digital-Product-Passports.pdf (Accessed: 23 July 2026).

Example 2: The Swedish School of Textiles Pilot (ETON and Gina Tricot)

Alongside Trace4Value, a separate pilot coordinated through the Swedish School of Textiles brought together several Swedish fashion companies, including tailoring brand ETON and fast-fashion retailer Gina Tricot, to test DPP readiness ahead of the EU's textile delegated act.

  • ETON's Global Head of Sustainability, Lina Ödeén, has described the first step as a gap analysis: comparing the data ETON already held in its existing systems against the data a DPP would eventually require, rather than starting to collect new information from scratch.
  • Gina Tricot, which has long-standing relationships with many of its suppliers, found this an advantage — established relationships made early data requests easier to act on than they would have been with newer, less familiar partners.
  • Both companies tested the process on a real product line rather than attempting to map their entire catalogue at once.

Lesson: A gap analysis against existing systems, not a blank-page data collection exercise, is consistently how real organisations begin. Long-standing supplier relationships also appear to meaningfully shorten the time needed to get usable data — reinforcing why starting with the strongest, best-documented part of the business tends to work better than starting everywhere at once.

Source: TrusTrace (2026) How fashion brands can prepare for the EU Digital Product Passport: a practical guide. Available at: https://trustrace.com/knowledge-hub/how-fashion-brands-can-prepare-for-the-eu-digital-product-passport-a-practical-guide-1 (Accessed: 23 July 2026).

Example 3: The CIRPASS-2 Textile Lighthouse Pilot (Avery Dennison and circular.fashion)

CIRPASS-2 is an EU-funded initiative (Digital Europe Programme, May 2024–April 2027) bringing together roughly 50 partners to test Digital Product Passports across four value chains — textiles, electronics, tyres and construction — through 13 "lighthouse" pilots. Six of these pilots focus specifically on textiles. One of them pairs Avery Dennison, a labelling and packaging materials company, with circular.fashion, a circular design platform, to track garments designed against circular.fashion's Circular Design Criteria as they move into repair, resale, sorting and recycling services.

The pilot follows garments across multiple stakeholders — from retail through collection, repair and upcycling — rather than stopping at the point of sale.

Its purpose is explicitly to test interoperability: whether DPP data created by one actor (a brand or manufacturer) can be picked up and used by a completely different actor (a recycler or resale platform) later in the product's life.

Unlike the Trace4Value and Swedish School of Textiles pilots, which are brand-led, this pilot is run by a materials/technology partner and a circularity-standards organisation — testing the DPP from the infrastructure side rather than the retailer side.

Lesson: Readiness isn't only about a brand's own data. It also depends on whether that data can be understood and used by parties the brand never directly works with — repairers, resellers, recyclers — which is exactly why interoperability, not just data collection, is one of CIRPASS-2's central research questions.

Documented in: Fraunhofer IZM (n.d.) CIRPASS-2. Available at: https://www.izm.fraunhofer.de/en/institut/projects/cirpass-2.html (Accessed: 23 July 2026); Avery Dennison (2024) A.D. & circular fashion bring Digital Product Passports. Available at: https://apparelsolutions.averydennison.com/en/perspectives/avery-dennison-and-circular-fashion-bring-digital (Accessed: 23 July 2026).

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