‘Technology’ in fashion is a wide-reaching term, one that covers
anything from product data and traceability, to logistics, inventory
management and garment labels. As an umbrella term, technology covers all
of these topics and is an increasingly pivotal enabler of circular business
models. But when we talk about technology we are no longer talking only
about garments being tracked from suppliers to retail stores in order to
measure how many garments are sold, nor are we talking only traditional
stitch-on garment tags which display country of origin and (often
unreliable) information on a product’s material composition. Instead, it’s
time to spotlight the rise of ‘digital triggers’ in facilitating circular
fashion models.

In circular resale and rental business models, brands and solution
providers need to account for sold garments coming back into their
possession, so that they can be repaired, reused or recycled. To facilitate
this second, third and fourth life, each individual garment would benefit
from an unique identification code and inbuilt lifecycle tracking. In
rental, each garment needs to be tracked along its journey from the
customer to repair or cleaning, back into the rentable inventory, and back
out to the next customer. In resale, third-party platforms need to know
exactly what kind of used garment they have in their possession, including,
for instance, original sales and marketing data, which can help to verify
whether it’s authentic and inform how to price it’s resale for future
customers. Enter: digital triggers.

What are the options

A digital trigger connects a consumer with data contained in a software
platform. The kind of data that a consumer can access is controlled by the
brand and service provider and could be specific garment information—such
as its care instructions and fibre content—or allow the consumer to engage
with the brand regarding their purchase— by directing them to a digital
marketing campaign about the garment’s production, for example. Currently,
the most recognizable and common way to include a digital trigger in a
garment is to add a QR code to a care label or a QR code to a separate
companion label that states ‘scan me’. Most consumers today are aware they
can scan a QR code with their smartphone, although QR code adoption rates
vary widely by region. Asia leads in adoption rates, while Europe lags far
behind.

The challenge is keeping the QR code on the garment for its entire life,
as care labels are often cut off by consumers. Yes reader, you too! We’ve
all done it before. And no label means no data. To mitigate this risk,
brands can add a QR code to a sewn-in woven label or embed a label via a
heat transfer, thus ensuring that the QR code cannot be cut out of the
garment. That said, having a QR code woven into the fabric itself does not
make it as obvious to the consumer that the QR code is associated with care
and content information, making it less likely that they would be drawn to
scanning it for the intended purpose.

A second is an NFC (Near Field Communication) tag embedded in a woven
label, which is extremely unlikely to be removed. However, the garment
maker then needs to make it very obvious to a consumer that it is present
in the woven label and there needs to be an awareness of how to download an
NFC reader on their smartphone. Some smartphones, especially those released
in the past few years, have NFC chips built into the hardware, but not all
phones do, and this means many consumers need to download a dedicated NFC
reader from the app store.

The final type of digital trigger that can be applied is an RFID
(radio-frequency identification) tag, but RFID tags are generally not
customer-facing. Instead, they are used on hang tags or packaging to track
products through their life cycles of production and warehousing, through
to the customer, and back to the retailer for repair or resale. RFID tags
require a dedicated reader, and this limitation means that consumers aren’t
able to scan them, meaning consumer-facing information must be accessible
elsewhere. RFID tags, therefore, are useful for solution providers and
back-end processes as they facilitate traceability throughout the lifecycle
chain. A further complication for their application is that RFID tags often
do not meet wash standards, which is less than ideal for circular apparel
models for the apparel industry, where readability over time is
essential.

How should a brand decide/

Brands consider multiple factors in their decision to implement digital
tech solutions, including the future of their products, future legislation,
engagement with consumers through the life of a product and the garment’s
environmental impact. They also want their customers to lengthen the
lifespan of their garments by recycling, repairing or reusing it. Through
the smart use of digital triggers and labels, brands are also better able
to understand the needs of their customers.

For example, by tracking garments along the multiple stages of their
lifecycle, brands can know when repairs are needed or when to direct
consumers to have the garment recycled. Digital labels can also be a more
aesthetic and practical option, as physical care labels are often cut off
due to discomfort or being visually unattractive, while a digital trigger
can remain on a product for longer by being placed directly on the garment.
Typically, brands reviewing the digital trigger product options (NFC, RFID,
QR or other) will review the easiest and most cost-efficient way to add a
digital trigger on to their existing product, without compromising the
ability of that digital trigger to remain on the product for its entire
lifespan.

The choice of technology also depends on what they aim to achieve. If a
brand wants to present customers with more information about the journey of
the garment or give them options on how to engage with circularity or
recycling, they will need to implement a digital trigger like QR or NFC
because RFID isn’t scannable by customers. However, if a brand wants to
conduct efficient in-house or outsourced inventory management and track
assets throughout the repair and cleaning services for a rental model, a
washable RFID makes a lot of sense.

The far-reaching potential of digital tagging

Currently, physical care labels are still a legal requirement but
increasingly, country-specific legislation is trending towards allowing
care and content information to be delivered digitally. As customers demand
more transparency around their products, the first step is that digital
triggers are expected to increasingly show up as an add-on to physical care
labels, rather than a replacement. This dual-approach is more accessible
for brands, less disruptive, and allows for additional information to be
stored about the product and for further engagement with re-commerce,
rental or recycling models. In practice, this means that for the
foreseeable future physical tags will continue to use the country of origin
and material composition, but either on the same or add-on tag, or embedded
directly into the fabric itself, will be a scannable trigger.

These digital triggers allow for new levels of transparency, as brands
can show the supply chain journey of the garments and clothes can be
validated for authenticity. In addition, by allowing consumers to scan
items into a digital wardrobe, brands can also create new revenue channels
on digital platforms by facilitating consumers to resell their own used
clothing. Finally, digital triggers can enable re-commerce or rental by,
for example, showing consumers where their nearest suitable recycling
station is.

Adidas & Avery Dennison: Digital tagging to unify customers under one
platform

Adidas’ ‘Infinite Play’ take-back program was launched in 2019 in the
UK, and initially could only accept products that consumers had bought from
official Adidas channels as products automatically went into their purchase
history online and were then set for resale. This meant items couldn’t be
scanned in via a code on the garment itself. However, since Adidas sells a
significant proportion of its products through wholesalers and third-party
resellers, the circular initiative wasn’t reaching nearly as many customers
as it could. Adidas needed to enable more consumers to participate. The
solution, it turns out, was already on the product. Alongside their
technology and labelling partner Avery Dennison, Adidas products already
had a matrix code: a companion QR code that could connect consumers’
garments to the Infinite Play app irrespective of where the garment was
purchased.

Now that we have set this up, Adidas has realised the thousands of use
cases that are possible, from traceability and transparency to product
authentication – Luca Mosca – Adidas

For the consumer, the system is relatively simple and the QR code plays
a critical role at every step in the process. A consumer goes to the
Infinite Play app and scans their garment’s QR code to register the
product, where it will join their purchase history alongside other products
bought at official Adidas channels.

The app will then show the consumer a buy-back price for the item. If
interested, the consumer can choose to resell the item. Adidas adopted
their existing product article numbers, which are found on the product’s
label, to let a user know if their product is eligible to return and if so,
the Adidas gift card they would receive as compensation.

Finally, Stuffstr, a resale solution provider, facilitates a home
pick-up and manages the further processing of the product(s), before the
item gets resold into the Infinite Play program for a second life.

Adidas cites two key benefits to using a companion QR label. Firstly, QR
content can be permanent or dynamic. When a garment is first purchased, the
digital trigger can show certain information, but after two years the brand
can change the visible information to show, updated recycling options in
your local area, for example. Secondly, QR codes identify each garment
individually. No two shirts are the same, even within the same model and
color. This asset-level identification is incredibly important in resale
and rental, and for Adidas, it meant it was able to accurately estimate
buy-back prices, authenticate real garments and give second-life consumers
a detailed description of what they were actually buying.

Caastle: Digital tagging to drive a full-service rental model

CaaStle is a turnkey fully managed service that enables brands, such as
Scotch and Soda, LOFT and Vince to offer rental business models by
providing technology, reverse logistics, systems and infrastructure as an
end-to-end solution. Early on, CaaStle made the decision that they needed
to track garments at the individual asset level, not just SKUs (generally
only style and color). As CaaStle reports, if a brand is operating a linear
model where clothing is sold and is never expected to return, there is no
need to track each asset. All that is needed, in that case, is to know how
much a supplier is going to make of a particular garment, how many come
through, and how many are sold on.

Tracking each asset enables the industry to monetise inventory in new ways.
If you birth garments digitally, then at the point where you want to make
the business decision to adopt a recommerce or rental model, you can go
ahead. – Amy Kang, CaaStle

In a rental business model, each asset must be tracked individually. You
need to know which asset is sitting in the warehouse, which one is sitting
with the customer and which one is being cleaned. This is especially
important as it relates to gradual wear and tear of garments as they have
multiple life cycles. A brand or solution provider managing rental garments
needs to be able to track how many uses each garment has been through at
each point of sale, and how damage reports can act as a feedback loop for
design improvements and material choices. This is important as customers
are less flexible when it comes to evaluating the quality of used or rented
clothing; minor stitching problems may not be accepted. In using an
asset-level tracking systems, CaaStle can track garments through the
inspection, processing and cleaning processes, so if a garment is sent to a
customer with a hole and the customer complains, they are able to track
back exactly where it went wrong in their processing.

In the CaaStle system of digital triggers and tracking, Amy Kang
(Director of product platform systems) explains that three key factors are
essential; the permanence, readability, and identification speed of the
technology. CaaStle has shifted over the years from fabric stickers and
markers to barcodes, and gradually towards washable RFID, and have
therefore experienced, first hand, how these factors vary across technology
types.

As shown in the table, fabric stickers and markers are less than ideal
across the board, though they are cheaper solutions and can be faster to
market. As CaaStle reports, having manually written markings or stickers
are much more susceptible to fading or coming off in the wash. Barcodes and
washable RFID are much more consistently readable and don’t fade, yet it is
also important to make sure the digital trigger is woven or sewn in a
consistent place on the garments to avoid warehouse workers constantly
searching for the tag and slowing the efficiency of the process. With
higher scanning identification speeds on top of all of that, washable RFID
holds strong potential, and CaaStle and many other leading solution
providers anticipate shifting towards this solution, once the technology
develops further in terms of, for instance, the error rate when scanning
garments at certain proximities.

Renewal workshop: Digital tagging for transparent and accessible
resale

The Renewal Workshop (TRW) is a complete end-to-end resale service, with
headquarters in Oregon, USA and a second base in Amsterdam. TRW accepts
pre-consumer overstock and return products, or post-consumer products—sorts
them for reuse, and cleans and restores the reusable items to a like-new
condition, before listing them either on their own website or a white-label
plugin on the partnering brands website. From the beginning, digital
tagging has been an important aspect of their process and TRW identifies
different priorities of asset-level tracking in its facilitation of a brand
resale business model.

Similar to Adidas and CaaStle, TRW manages products at an asset level.
They then feed it into a white label e-commerce platform which is branded
by the actual brand. TRW manages the backend inventory and customer
service. Every garment has a barcode and serial number, and TRW uses this
serial number to gather data from the original brand. It’s important for
TRW to know the details of the used garment that they have in their
possession so they know exactly which version of the garment they have, how
much it cost when it was released and how to describe it when they re-list
it for sale again. It can be difficult to obtain this product information
because most brands operating in a linear system do not have processes in
place to account for a product coming back. Once it is sold, it’s
essentially forgotten.

“What we’ve seen is that customers want as much data when buying a
secondhand item as they have when they buy new” – Jeff Denby – The Renewal
Workshop

Because customers increasingly expect data in second hand purchases,
just as with original product information, the industry stands to benefit
from making this data accessible and transferable.

So what does the future hold? In the ideal world led by our partners and
brands, the industry would move forwards in developing ‘digital passports’,
for garments which hold a universally agreed asset-level digital trigger
which could be accessed by brands, retailers, recyclers and customers
alike. This kind of standardized technology and labeling solution means
that not every brand or solution provider is coming up with their own
proprietary processes, leaving customers confused in a sea of
things-to-remember. The future of technology in fashion, in this sense,
could truly unify the industry around common practices that would make
circularity more accessible for everyone.

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through training programmes, masterclasses, circularity assessments, and
more. Learn more here