by Kim van der Weerd, January 31, 2024

Supplier Meet-Ups are private, off-the-record conversations open only to suppliers, held once per month. They are an initiative of the Fashion Producer Collective, supported by the Asia Garment Hub. Each month, one supplier shares a specific challenge they’re facing and the group talks through different strategies for tackling it together. More often than not, the challenges raised during these sessions are shared, and, occasionally, they catalyze more formal collaborations.

In January, our discussion focused on traceability. A couple of regular Supplier Meet-Up participants were looking to understand which platforms and methods their peers are using to meet increasingly stringent traceability requirements. 

The discussion kicked off with a conversation about intention: what were brands and retailers looking to achieve through traceability requirements? Participants expressed that sometimes a lack of clarity on this point made it difficult for suppliers to define an approach. 

One participant noted: “US brands are focused on cotton and China. But in the EU they want the name of the farmer, their wage, whether they have fire safety on the farm, and so on. One cone of yarn can come from 1000 farmers!”  

This resonated with several participants, whilst others noted that their requests were mainly focused on cotton. But even here, it wasn’t always clear which countries, or even provinces within a country should be considered at high risk of forced labor. One participant shared that different international entities had very different lists - which should they follow? 

Another noted that they’d recently had customers asking for evidence that their synthetic fabrics were made of Putin-free oil. Another chimed in that the luxury brands they work with are also very concerned about traceability and deforestation.

Which department should oversee traceability requirements? Several participants shared that although their sustainability teams were involved, their sourcing teams were ultimately responsible. One participant shared: “[Our sustainability department] set up a manual process and SOP for our sourcing team to implement.” Another shared: “In my company, it's also the sourcing team that does traceability, although [as the sustainability lead] I am consulted.”

There was consensus that particulars aside, collecting traceability data is an extremely heavy lift for suppliers. Participants were unanimous that a single technology platform capable of handling the breadth and depth of requirements coming their way simply does not exist, but it would be helpful if it did! Moreover, they lamented the lack of interoperability across systems. One participant shared: “Finding a single platform that feeds into multiple platforms and can fulfill all the various requirements coming at us is hard.”

This reality drove some participants to set up manual and primarily Excel-based systems. One participant reflected: “We are also doing this manually, just on cotton. That’s a huge amount of work. Now some brands want it for other fibers or by product.”  Another remarked: “What if the requirements change? Then we will have invested all this money in a platform that no longer works for us.” 

Others had reluctantly made the plunge and invested in technology platforms. One person remarked: “Some of these platforms cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that doesn’t even include the resources and staffing we have to have internally to use them.”

Participants exchanged notes on several platforms: Textile Genesis, Retraced, Trus Trace, Oritain, FiberTrace, Ecovaris, Oritain, the Regenerative Cotton Alliance, YESS, and beyond. One person shared that they’d heard that European Outdoor Group was working on putting together a platform by 2025, but that for now, this was also Excel-based, and painful. They noted that a consolidated list of traceability platforms, along with pros and cons, doesn’t seem to exist, and that this would be a valuable resource for suppliers. 

One person shared that they’d decided to work with Retraced because they felt that it enabled them to do traceability their own bottom-up, rather than top-down way. They’d encouraged their farmers and ginners to use the application and had secured the support of some brands to offer upcharges to enable this. The program could also be used by their vendors for account management, which was a bonus. The participant remarked: “Traceability requires giving incentives to all parts of the supply chain.”

Several suppliers echoed their support for this kind of joint position on data ownership, with one person noting that “it would only work if we all did it. Suppliers could undercut each other by giving their data for free.”

Another shared: “Right now, for the most part, the platforms own the data and that’s just not appropriate. We should own our data. Where’s our share in the profit?”

Yet another remarked: “What’s happening isn’t fair.”

Another shared: “I heard Sourcery is working on a project that would create incentives for farmers by creating a fee for data use. That way, if people want to use our data, or our vendors’ data, they pay for it.” We agreed to continue the conversation on traceability and data equity at the next meet-up on 8 February at 9:30AM CET. Specifically, we’ll continue to swap notes on the pros and cons of different platforms and explore further the possibility of joint action on data equity.