Why Your Design Team Cannot Make Sustainable Choices Without Better Data

A design team spends two weeks going back and forth with a supplier, sourcing what they believe will be a compelling sustainable fabric for next season. Samples are approved. The mood board looks good. Then the business pulls the plug, because there are 800 metres of a perfectly usable fabric already sitting in a factory overseas, paid for and waiting. The brand is liable for that stock, and the least environmentally impactful thing it can do is use it. Two weeks of work, wasted. Not because anyone lacked good intentions, but because nobody had visibility of what was already available before the search began.

This is a pattern we see repeatedly across mid-market fashion businesses. The conversation about sustainability in fashion has matured considerably since we last wrote about it in 2022, but the underlying operational problem has not gone away. In fact, it has become more urgent. The question is no longer whether designers should understand sustainability. It is whether they have access to the structured data they need to make genuinely better decisions, and whether the systems around them support or obstruct that goal.

The information problem behind the sustainability problem

Most discussions about sustainable fashion focus on materials: which fibres are better, which certifications matter, which suppliers are compliant. These are important questions. But they obscure a more fundamental issue. In many fashion businesses, the design team simply does not have the information it needs at the point of decision.

Consider a common scenario. A designer is building a product that combines multiple materials: a shell fabric, a lining, trims, threads, labels. Each of those components has a fibre composition. If the finished product is going to be recyclable without disassembly (which is increasingly the expectation under circular economy frameworks), then those components need to be compatible. A polyester shell with a cotton lining and a nylon zip creates a product that cannot be recycled as a single unit. It will need to be taken apart, which in practice means it probably will not be recycled at all.

Now, the information required to avoid this outcome is not exotic. It is fibre composition data, already held (in theory) somewhere in the business. But if that data lives in disconnected spreadsheets, supplier emails, and the memory of a product developer who left six months ago, the designer has no practical way to find components with matching fibre profiles. The system does not help them make the right choice. It does not even help them see what choices exist.

A well-structured product management system changes this entirely. When raw material data is properly captured and searchable, a designer can look for fabrics and trims with the same fibre base, increasing the probability that the finished product can be recycled as a single unit. That is not a theoretical improvement. It is a tangible design decision, made possible by data availability.

The Digital Product Passport changes the stakes

When we did a deep-dive into this in late 2022, the EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) was still largely conceptual. It is not conceptual any longer. With compliance deadlines approaching from 2027, the DPP will require brands selling into EU markets to provide detailed, accessible information about a product's composition, origin, environmental impact, and end-of-life handling, including repair and recycling instructions.

Here is what makes this particularly consequential for design teams. The DPP does not expire when the season ends. It persists for the full lifecycle of the product. A consumer purchasing a jacket in 2028 may interact with its Digital Product Passport in 2035, when they want to know how to recycle it or where to get it repaired. The choices a designer made, the materials they specified, the suppliers they selected, will be visible years after the designer has forgotten the product ever existed.

This creates an accountability trail that the fashion industry has never had before. It is no longer enough to make a vaguely sustainable choice and move on. The data behind that choice will be encoded into a digital record that follows the product through its entire life.

Tools like id.codes are already preparing for this reality. The platform generates GS1-compliant QR codes that connect physical products to their digital passports, with a commitment to maintaining access to that product information for ten years. That is not a marketing feature. It is infrastructure for a regulatory requirement that will reshape how products are specified, documented, and sold.

For design teams, this means the data they input during product development is no longer internal housekeeping. It is the foundation of a legally required public record. Getting it right at source matters enormously.

What good looks like (and what we typically find)

When we begin working with a mid-market brand, typically between £5 million and £150 million in revenue with hundreds of SKUs per season, we generally find a familiar pattern. Product data is fragmented across multiple systems and formats. Fabric information lives in one place, supplier details in another, costing in a third. The design team has learned to work around these gaps through personal knowledge, semi-connected spreadsheets, email chains, and a shared drive that nobody fully trusts.

The gap between this starting point and what is actually needed is not a matter of adding one more spreadsheet column. It requires a fundamentally different approach to how product information is captured, connected, and made accessible.

A realistic technology stack for a brand at this scale starts with a good product management system (PLM) that includes robust raw material data capabilities. This is the foundation. The PLM needs to hold detailed composition, certification, and performance data for every material in the library, and that data needs to be searchable and filterable at the point of design.

But the PLM alone is not sufficient. Supplier engagement is the critical second layer. Designers and product teams need to be able to collaborate with suppliers about the data required for transparency and compliance. This is where a tool like supplier.studio becomes essential, providing a structured way for suppliers to contribute the information that brands need without drowning either party in email attachments and ad hoc requests.

The third layer is the outward-facing data infrastructure. Once a product has been developed with good data, that information needs to flow through to the consumer. This is where id.codes connects the internal product record to the Digital Product Passport, generating the QR codes that make product information accessible throughout the product's lifecycle.

The principle is straightforward. Connecting suppliers, designers, developers, retailers, and consumers along a string of connected data (whether that starts or ends in PLM, PIM, ERP, or connected systems like digital product passports and ecommerce platforms) gives the design team better ability to collaborate and make the right choices. Each system in the chain does not need to do everything. It needs to do its part well and pass clean data to the next.

However, this also means that systems have to be suitably configured to capture the additional information that sustainability and compliance now demand. Legacy systems, many of which were designed around costing and critical path management, simply do not have fields for fibre composition breakdowns, recycling instructions, or supply chain traceability data at all required levels. This is not a criticism of those systems as they were originally conceived. It is a recognition that the requirements have changed, and the tooling needs to change with them. Platforms like WFX, combined with supplier.studio for data collection and id.codes for consumer-facing transparency, represent what a modern, connected product data infrastructure looks like in practice.

The designer's role is changing, whether we prepare them or not

An earlier version of this article argued that fashion designers needed to be re-educated about sustainability. That argument still holds, but it has evolved. The question is no longer simply whether designers understand which fabrics are more sustainable. It is whether they have the tools, the data, and the connected systems to act on that understanding at the speed their business requires.

A designer who understands that mono-material products are more recyclable is only useful if the system lets them search for compatible components. A designer who knows that organic cotton has a lower water footprint or reduced contamination impact only makes better choices if the material library gives them visibility of certified options alongside conventional ones, with real data rather than assumptions.

Education and technology are not separate investments. They reinforce each other. A well-structured system teaches through use, surfacing the right information at the right moment. A well-informed designer gets more value from the system, because they know what to look for and why it matters.

The regulatory and commercial pressure is only increasing

Beyond the DPP, the broader regulatory environment is tightening. The EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is expanding the scope of sustainability disclosure requirements. France's AGEC law already mandates environmental labelling for textiles. The UK is reviewing its own approach to product sustainability information. For brands operating across multiple markets, the compliance surface area is growing rapidly, and the common denominator across all of these frameworks is the same: structured, verifiable product data.

Meanwhile, retailers and wholesale partners are increasingly requesting sustainability data as a condition of doing business. What was once a nice-to-have line on a line sheet is becoming a gate. Brands that cannot provide clear, substantiated information about their products' environmental credentials will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, not because consumers are demanding it (though many are), but because the commercial intermediaries are.

Where to start

If your business is still running product development on spreadsheets and email, the path forward does not require a wholesale transformation overnight. It begins with getting the fundamentals right.

First, assess what product data you actually hold and where it lives. Most brands are surprised by the degree of fragmentation once they map it honestly.

Second, identify the data you will need for compliance. The DPP requirements are published and specific. Working backwards from what will be required in 2027 gives you a clear list of fields and data points that your systems need to capture.

Third, evaluate whether your current tools can accommodate those requirements, or whether the gap is structural. If your PLM does not have fields for fibre composition, supply chain traceability, or end-of-life instructions, adding a column to a spreadsheet is not a long-term solution.

The brands that will navigate this transition most smoothly are those that treat product data as operational infrastructure, not as an afterthought to the creative process. The tools exist. The regulatory deadlines are set. The question is whether your design team has what it needs to make the right choices before those choices become permanent public records.

If you would like to explore how your current systems measure up, or how tools like WFX, supplier.studio, and id.codes fit together for your business, we are always happy to have that conversation.