Digital Product Passports are about to challenge your peace. To comply with the Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) under the European Green Deal, you’ll need to create Digital Product Passports (DPP) for all apparel put into the EU market by 2027 at the time of writing.
Your DPP has two parts: a centralized, digital source of product information and a DPP 'carrier,' which will be permanently attached to the product for its lifetime. This means a labeling overhaul to facilitate the carrier plus the added challenge of gathering large quantities of product data for each SKU.
The challenge doesn’t end there! You’ll also need to find a secure place to store and update all your product data for up to a decade. Luckily, you’re friends with us, and we’re a vertically integrated labeling partner with a CIRPASS2 membership and more resources than you can shake a stick at.
Not only can we provide you with several compliant and innovative DPP carrier options for your apparel labeling, but we can also now provide a secure, scalable Digital Product Passport platform. We’d like to introduce you to our newest innovation: CheckLINQ.
Meet CheckLINQ (your labels’ new best friend)
You'll need a bit of backstory before you can truly understand how CheckLINQ came into this world. It all starts with the DPP legislation announcement, which prompted us to do what we do best — cook up creative solutions to meet specific customer demands. We created DPP labeling solutions, and although our brand partners loved them, they wanted more. Namely, a secure platform to store all the information on the tags. So, we hit the drawing board a second time.
We used our labeling smarts, data integration expertise, and sustainability knowledge to make CheckLINQ — our answer to the digital aspect of DPP legislation. Launching this gives brands like you a complete end-to-end solution for Digital Product Passport legislation. And we like to think our expertise really shines through on this one.
CheckLINQ uses a flexible, data-centric approach to seamlessly integrate data points in bulk from almost any location, making collation and storage far quicker and easier. The software is part of an exclusive partnership model for labeling customers, with flexible branding options depending on the customization and functionality needed. It's all baked in and ready to go!
Scalable, secure, and transparent
Your CheckLINQ platform has been designed to remove pain points around DPP legislation, namely the secure, encrypted storage of hundreds of thousands of item-level product information. Because that's a heck of a lot of information to upload, store, and update.
CheckLINQ's back-end integration and data management capabilities are built with robust APIs using protocols like EDI, JSON, or XML. In plain English, it means you can quickly and easily pull product information from anywhere. CheckLINQ can extract and collate it into the required customer-facing format as long as you know where the data is stored. It’s even capable of easily handling manual data uploads if that’s the easiest way for you to get started. And if you're wondering whether the system will crash under the onslaught of data, you're planning to plug into it, you can rest easy. CheckLINQ is also routinely stress-tested to make sure it's fully scalable and fit for the task.
CheckLINQ removes compliance worries with encrypted security and privacy measures, including GDPR compliance. The data integration functionality also makes it easy for retailers to keep garment information up to date and compliant under their legal obligation.
Read: Unpicking EU compliance for fashion and textiles
Make the most of your investment
Finding a trusted partner to handle your DPP labels and digital info storage is great, but we're here to tell you that there's even more to get excited about. You've also got the option to combine your label solution with retail tech like RFID to generate and store even more relevant product information as part of your DPP label overhaul. You're redoing your labels anyway, so it's an opportune moment to upgrade to dual technology NFC and UHF RFID DUÉ Mini Labels, which give the benefits of customer interaction and RFID in one.
The addition of RFID means you'll generate a wealth of quality data, which could contribute to more transparent sustainability practices, smarter stock ordering and allocation, and better business benefits in the long term. Better yet, it’s all connected via CheckNet (a platform that handles over 68 million labels and processes data from 14 million RFID labels), so ordering your new labels is super simple. Heck yes.
A future-proof solution that evolves with you
Although the details relating to specific DPP product information aren’t expected until the end of 2025, we’ve got everything you need to kickstart your DPP project rollout ASAP. Aside from having our label offering locked down and ready to roll, CheckLINQ is also set up to collect the data points likely to be included in the finalized legislation. This includes country of origin, fabric composition, fabric origins, carbon footprint, and packaging composition.
The back-end system can be modified quickly and easily to include any new data points the European Commission chooses to release in the future, allowing you to begin the set-up process ASAP to keep ahead of the mammoth challenge and then evolve as new information is released.
You can also enjoy flexibility and customization options for the front-end interface. There are several template and color palette options for clients who opt for the top-tier package, plus the ability to add a logo and change the functionality to suit individual needs. This gives you the benefit of a platform that drives value beyond compliance for even better customer engagement. Bring it on, DPP! We’re ready for you.
To learn more about how to get CheckLINQ as part of a full DPP solution, complete with compliant labels, contact the team at Checkpoint today.
