Germany's retraced partners with Décor Global for product traceability

The partnership is building a chain-of-custody traceability tool that provides retailers and brands greater visibility and transparency into the supply chain and material origin, as well as the ability to retrieve all relevant documents needed to prove fibre provenance. The partnership will create an enterprise-scale platform solution that helps all relevant supply chain stakeholders trace and collect the verified proof documentation needed for easier risk assessment, reporting, and compliance management. The solution will be fully accessible globally and can be used to assess the provenance of all materials and fibres involved in Decor’s textile manufacturing, Retraced said in a press release.

Through the project, Décor and retraced will help their business partners gain transparency over their products’ supply chains and trace back the fibres and materials to the source. This comes in response to a global call for more responsible textile manufacturing.

Décor’s extensive network of strategic supply chain partners, and retraced’s compliance management platform community of more than 2,000 brands and suppliers, has allowed the two companies to collaborate and create a scalable and digital solution that meets current business needs. The new cascade traceability tool allows users to trace back the production and movement of their garments, and the base materials (eg. cotton fibre), based on proof documents that establish a verified chain of custody report (eg. purchase orders, delivery receipts, etc.).

"Ever since we started working with our brand and textile partners back in 2019, we’ve seen that companies need a way to retrace their production footsteps, and find out where their products are made, who makes them and how. Tracing is critical to understanding accountability in supply chains, and we’ve always had this in mind when building retraced,” said Peter Merkert co-founder and CTO of retraced. “Now regulators and governments are making tracing and risk monitoring a requirement for the industry. This has helped accelerate the need for something business-ready, usable, and scalable and our platform is ready to deliver.  Our partnership with Décor is the perfect launching point for an enterprise-grade traceability solution that skips all the unnecessary and impractical bells and whistles, and goes directly to addressing both an industry-wide transparency problem, and a specific business compliance need.“

The Décor and retraced partnership announcement comes after a successful 6-month pilot period that started in March 2021. Retraced onboarded Décor’s primary supply chain partners to the retraced sustainability management platform and helped to start digitizing and automating the documentation process. In order to serve both the current regulatory requirements and future market demands of fiber supply chain transparency, the two companies decided to scale the project to ensure that all Décor’s supply chains and materials will be fully traceable. By April 2022 the traceability tool will be live, and by August 2022 Décor and retraced’s partners will be able to access all needed regulatory and compliance information for their supply chains, the release added.

“Transparency is critical in the ever-evolving dynamics of the fashion industry. In addition to the regulatory requirements in different countries to which we ship goods, the global end consumer is also raising their expectations of how a product is made and what it is made from. Responsible sourcing practices and transparent supply chains are not trends; they are the expectation. For a company that sources and produces materials all over the world, it’s our job within the value chain to lead by example and bring our supply chain partners along on the journey. To Decor, this isn’t about compliance. It’s about being a global role model,” Michael Cai, director of operations and supply chain of Décor.