Jumper from Danish designer Martine Jarlgaard. A partnership between Provenance, A Transparent Company and the London College of Fashion innovation agency has enabled each step of the process to be recorded and tracked via blockchain through the Provenance application.

How Blockchain Can Make Fashion More Transparent and Sustainable

Some technologies will move the industry towards greater accountability

Modefica
Modefica
Nov 5 · 6 min read

Blockchain technology is not easy to understand for those unfamiliar with it. It’s like explaining the Internet to someone in the 1980s. It’s intangible and new — although simple, it’s disruptive and challenging at first. In fashion, in the short-term, blockchain is a powerful tool to make this industry more transparent, minimize greenwashing, and bring consumers closer to the (long) story behind their clothes.

Neliana Fuenmay is the founder of A Transparent Company and a pioneer in integrating blockchain into the fashion supply chain. She came from London to talk about precisely it during the blockchain panel within the Good Fashion Arena, promoted by C&A Foundation at Sustainable Brands São Paulo. She told us a little about the case study in which she took part, tracking the first fashion piece from the fiber to the store via blockchain. Before clothing and garments, she worked on blockchain implementation in the coconuts and tuna supply chain, tracking its moves from Asia to Europe.

Neliana’s history with fashion began a while ago. Aged 31 and a graduate of the London College of Fashion, she began experiencing a value crisis. Issues such as pollution, poor working conditions, and a supply chain as opaque as it is fragmented clashed in opposition to her inherent passion for fashion. “When you become aware of these things, you have two options: either just ignore it or do something about it”, she said, during an interview she agreed on, before returning to London. She found in blockchain the possibility to do something about it.

But what is blockchain anyway? In Neliana’s words, it is an information layer that allows anyone, in this case, from the supply chain, to prove a claim. Be it about sustainability, quality, and even authenticity. Its name sums it up: blocks [of information/transaction] in a chain.

For production chain control, blockchain becomes tangible into an identification number on each product, something like a passport, where all its trajectory information is open, shared, and incorruptible. “People already do this with pen and paper. Using blockchain is digitalizing all this information in a decentralized way”, she explains.

For example, today, when a cotton lot leaves the farm, it is controlled through closed systems (or even pen and paper). A sales invoice and a bill of lading are usually issued, and this information about this specific lot is kept with the producers. When the carrier delivers the cotton to the textile company, they sign a paper and need to issue a purchase invoice, and so on. These processes accompany the raw material until it becomes a final product in each step of the chain. By storing all this information in a blockchain system, rather than internal or analog systems, the information blocks accumulate and self-validate. Once the information is there, it stays there forever — and is accessible to anyone with a QR Code or NFC reader on their cell phone.

The first fashion product to be tracked via blockchain was a jumper by Danish designer Martine Jarlgaard. A partnership between Provenance, A Transparent Company, and London College of Fashion’s innovation agency has enabled each step of the process to be registered and tracked via blockchain through Provenance’s app. From alpaca shearing at the British Alpaca Fashion farm to spinning at Two Rivers Mill, to knitting at Knitster LDN and finally to be used as a fabric at Martine Jarlgaard London. The piece comes with a code that, when read, shows all of its history in detail. In this case, we even know from which alpacas the raw material came from: James Bond, Skyfall, and Othelo.

When what the brand has to show is not pretty

This example is quite simple and straightforward. There are only a few suppliers, and everything happened within England. Other than that, being transparent is easier and good for marketing if the company prides itself on its processes. It may not be the case when your supply chain is global, and your company has little control over it — with the possibility of child labor, chemicals being thrown into community rivers, and outsourced to home sweatshops. That is why blockchain may be implemented privately at first, as Wallmart did with IBM, or in companies that have more control over their processes. However, hiding information will become increasingly difficult for brands. “Louis Vuitton paid for its factory in Romania not to be found. I mean, really? There is no way to hide things anymore. Companies will have to give in”, ponders Neliana.

For her, companies feel that they need to be perfect before being transparent, but transparency is transparency, and their business processes need to be shared with customers, independent of how they seem. The bright side is that we are entering an era of radical transparency and it’s all about brand reputation. When some brands start to adopt certain behaviors, others feel they need to keep up. No one wants to be the “bad guy” or the liar. Consequently, companies will better their deeds more and more. “Transparency is unlikely to be a mere trend and brands worried about their reputation will get closer to consumers through it,” she says. Blockchain is here for that (also).

In this way, blockchain becomes not only a traceability tool but also a driver toward sustainability. Transparency per se does not mean much — it is not enough to know in which garment factory the product was made; we need to know under what conditions and what are the workshop procedures. Once companies have their supply chains tracked — and wide open to the public -, implementing fairer working conditions, environmental policies, and sharing more and more details about suppliers should be a natural step. Transparency is about building a good reputation after all.

The main challenges to implement blockchain in the fashion industry

“I feel there are two different stories here: how blockchain is implemented in production chains before the product hits the store. Then how it will be delivered to the consumer is another strategy, including how this product will be tracked back to the brand or producer”, explains Neliana. When it comes to the first account, especially in global chains, many brands don’t know where their products and workforce come from, holding a very limited view of their supply chain. Added to this is the fact that fashion is not quite pro-tech; it still lives in the 2.0 era.

We can assume that sportswear brands like Nike and Adidas should be the first to dive into blockchain traceability and transparency. In factories where processes are fully automated, it is not unrealistic to think that information can be entered straight from the sewing machine into the blockchain system without intermediaries. Moreover, these two companies even produce some of their raw materials themselves — such as Nike Flyleather and Adidas Bionic Yarn, which makes traceability even more viable.

Communicating blockchain technology to consumers little or not familiar with the concept is a second issue. Neliana points out that the western population, unlike the Asian, does not use QR Codes and NCFs frequently. “It is a technology that is not widespread here yet. You go to China, and they use QR Codes for everything”, she states. How to get people to pull out their smartphones and scan the codes? Usability is an issue, and it is a field that needs a lot of attention and research to warrant functionality to the technology.

The future goes far beyond traceability

Blockchain in fashion is about supply chain traceability for the near future, but it can offer much more. For Neliana, the future of this technology in the industry comes through advances in fibers and yarns themselves. Sensors in the fabric can allow the piece to be scanned and voilà, all information about it appears on the screen — and beyond the supply chain. “This technology can help reverse logistics progress by assigning the piece that would be discarded back to the producer. With this kind of technology, we can even determine how many times the laundry was washed, durability issues, and so on”, she envisions.

And if you think this is too futuristic, think again. There is already an American start-up combining fabrics with a kind of artificial intelligence to collect usage data — which is controlled by wearers and can be sold by themselves to brands or research services. With further blockchain development, this type of technology can also be one of the tools for implementing a circular economy. Blockchain as supply chain traceability is just the beginning.

Written by Marina Colerato
Translation by Carol Costa


Originally published at modefica.com.br on September 27, 2017.

Modefica Global

Sustainability beyond the first page

Modefica

Written by

Modefica

Modefica Global

Sustainability beyond the first page

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