Navigating DPP implementation: Renoon CEO on challenges and gains

Operational questions are causing a bottleneck when it comes to DPP implementation rather than its requirements. Who owns this data internally? Which budget covers it? Which suppliers need to be onboarded first? On what timeline? These are some of the questions that DPP provider Renoon faced.

The company started as an app for sustainable fashion meant for consumers but now specialises in end-to-end DPP infrastructure and traceability for the fashion industry. While product management, traceability and compliance was earlier tackled as three separate areas by industry stakeholders, Renoon understands itself as an end-to-end DPP delivery solution with one connected process that combines regulatory expertise, supplier onboarding, data infrastructure and deployment.

The company works with fashion brands across Europe that are of different sizes, therefore the implementation challenges are also very different. While for large fashion companies, they are mainly related to governance, for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), operational capacity can be an issue. FashionUnited wanted to know more and spoke with Renoon co-founder and CEO Iris Skrami on how brands can get started, what some of the challenges and data blinds spots are, and how data sharing works most efficiently.

Can you expand on the different challenges depending on company size?

For larger companies, EU regulatory requirements create real questions about ownership and cross-functional coordination as well as where the DPP sits within broader digital transformation programmes. In these organisations, the first move is typically a business case and an internal alignment process, not a technology deployment.

Smaller companies have smaller teams and resources are distributed across fewer people, hence the idea of a multi-year transformation programme is not realistic. What Renoon typically builds with these brands is a phased roadmap: where to start, which suppliers to prioritise, what implementation can look like in year one versus year three. The brands moving fastest are not necessarily investing more. They are making earlier decisions about ownership, supplier engagement and data strategy.

How is data driving implementation?

One of the more consistent findings in Renoon's work is that brands tend to overestimate how much data they are missing, and underestimate how fragmented the data is that they have. Product information sits in PLM systems; operational data lives in ERP [enterprise resource planning, ed.] platforms. Supplier certifications, traceability records and environmental data are managed through a separate layer of processes, spreadsheets and partner portals. The information exists. It is just not connected in a way that is verifiable, scalable or structured for a product-level passport. In other words, the data is there but the infrastructure and interoperability is not. Thus, the real question often is how existing systems, supplier networks and compliance requirements can be made to speak to each other within a single framework.

What were some of the early challenges and what are some challenges now?

Early on, the challenge was legitimacy. We were asking brands to invest time and resources in something that felt speculative: a regulation that wasn't yet enforced, a data infrastructure that did not yet exist at scale, and a category of provider that the market had not fully named yet. Getting early partnerships meant convincing people to move before the majority did.

Now the challenge has inverted. Awareness is not the bottleneck anymore. What we consistently find is that brands understand the requirement but have not resolved the internal questions that need to come first: who owns this, which budget covers it, which suppliers get prioritised and when. The decision-making friction has shifted from “should we do this” to “how do we actually start.” That sounds like progress, and it is, but it introduces a different kind of complexity. We are often as much an alignment partner as a technical one.

What was the biggest “data blind spot” you discovered when mapping multi-tier supply chains?

The assumption that missing data means data does not exist. In almost every implementation we have done, brands overestimate how much they are missing and underestimate how fragmented what they have already is. Product information lives in PLM [product life cycle, ed.] systems. Operational data sits in ERP platforms. Certifications, environmental records and traceability documentation are spread across spreadsheets, supplier portals and email chains. The data exists, it is just not connected in a way that is verifiable or structured for a product-level passport.

”The biggest data blind spot is the assumption that missing data means data does not exist.“

The real blind spot is the tier two and three layer. Brands generally have reasonable visibility into their direct manufacturers. But the materials, the dyes, the chemical inputs, those come from suppliers that their suppliers source from. That is where the genuine unknowns are, and it is also where the DPP will eventually require the most work.

How do you handle suppliers who are hesitant to share proprietary information about their facilities or chemical inputs?

With a lot of patience and a clear distinction between what the DPP actually requires and what brands sometimes ask for. Suppliers are often protecting competitive information, the specific processes, formulations or sourcing relationships that differentiate them. That is legitimate. What DPP compliance needs is not their recipe. It needs verifiable attributes. Those can usually be structured in a way that protects proprietary detail while still producing a compliant, credible passport.

Part of our work is helping brands have better conversations with their suppliers, framing this not as an audit but as a shared infrastructure problem. Suppliers who understand that the DPP is coming regardless, and that being ready early positions them as preferred partners, tend to engage differently than those who feel they are being scrutinised.

At what point in the manufacturing process is the digital carrier (QR) actually assigned: at the fibre stage or once the garment is finished?

In practice, this varies by use case and product complexity, but the most common approach we see is carrier assignment at the finished goods stage, typically during final production or pre-shipment, because that is the point at which a stable, unique product identity can be reliably established. Assigning earlier creates traceability continuity challenges: a fibre lot or fabric roll does not map one-to-one to a finished SKU [stock keeping unit, ed.], especially across cut-and-sew operations with yield variation.

That said, for brands prioritising deep material traceability, where the origin of a specific fibre batch matters for the DPP claim, we do work with upstream data linkages that are associated to the passport retroactively. The QR on the garment points to a passport that can hold data collected at multiple earlier points in the chain, even if the carrier itself was applied at the end.

How do you and your clients ensure the digital ID stays ‘alive’ and readable through years of laundry cycles or heavy wear?

This is partly a physical durability question and partly a data architecture question, and both matter. On the physical side, the carrier technology itself, whether woven label, heat-transfer or embedded chip, needs to be specified for the product's expected lifecycle. A QR on a paper hangtag serves a different purpose than one woven into a care label or encoded in an NFC chip. For products with long or intensive use cycles, the specification conversation is part of the implementation scoping.

On the data side, the more important question is what happens to the underlying passport infrastructure over time, because the physical carrier is only as useful as the endpoint it points to. Renoon builds DPP infrastructure with data persistence and URL stability as non-negotiable requirements. A scan five years from now needs to resolve to a valid, current record, not a broken link. That is less glamorous than the QR itself, but it is where most DPP implementations will quietly fail if they do not plan for it from the beginning.

Last but not least, what motivated you to move away from a consumer-facing app toward a platform specialising in Digital Product Passports and supply chain traceability?

The honest answer is that the consumer app taught us something we could not have learned any other way: consumers want transparency, but brands control whether it exists. You can build the most beautiful product discovery experience, and it hits a ceiling the moment the underlying data is not there. We kept running into the same wall, and it was not a demand problem, but a more structural one. The information brands have about their own products is fragmented, unverified and not designed to be shared at product level. At some point it became obvious that the more important problem to solve was upstream. DPP regulation gave that work a deadline, but the infrastructure gap we were building into existed long before the regulation did.

The interview was conducted in written format.