Circularity Starts at Product Design How Digital Product Passports Help Brands Create Products That Last
For the past decade, the fashion industry has fixated on circularity at the end of the product lifecycle, resale, textile recycling, take-back programs, repair initiatives, and rental models. These solutions matter, but they all share the same limitation: they intervene after waste is already created.
The industry can no longer ignore a simple, foundational truth:
The greatest opportunity for circular impact exists at the design stage, not after the fact.
Whether a product accelerates waste or delivers long-term value is determined the moment decisions are made about materials, construction, grading, durability, and intended use. A product designed to fail will always fail, no matter how many downstream programs exist to catch it.
Despite this, design teams still operate with partial information, and in many cases, none at all.
The Design Stage: Fashion’s Blind Spot
Most brands still make design decisions without understanding how their products perform in real environments. This isn’t a minor oversight, it is one of the industry’s most expensive structural weaknesses.
Designers often lack visibility into:
the top return drivers and patterns
recurring fit failures across sizes or categories
which fabrics degrade faster than intended
where construction choices cause premature damage
how customers actually care for and repair products
the environmental cost of each material or design choice
The result is predictable: avoidable waste and avoidable cost.
Poor fit drives return rates. Durability issues erode customer trust. Material choices misaligned with real-world behaviour shorten product life. Meanwhile, overproduction and unsellable returns continue to balloon global emissions.
WRAP research shows that extending a garment’s active life by just nine months reduces its carbon, water, and waste footprint by roughly 20%. Yet in Europe, 22–44% of returned garments are never resold, despite being perfectly wearable. They move straight to liquidation or destruction.
These failures don’t happen at end of life. They happen at the very beginning, at design.
Circularity Improves When We Design for It Early
The most forward-thinking brands are recognizing that circularity is not a marketing initiative or an end-of-life program, it is a design discipline. As customers increasingly value longevity over trend churn, durability, repairability, and transparency are becoming core brand differentiators.
Design teams need clear, actionable intelligence on:
how products are built
how materials behave
where supply chain risks surface
the longevity implications of each design decision
For years, this information simply wasn’t accessible. Today, Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are closing that gap.
Digital Product Passports: Bringing Intelligence to Design
A Digital Product Passport provides a complete, verified record of a product’s materials, construction, environmental footprint, and circularity options. It centralizes fragmented data into a single, reliable source of truth for the entire organization, design, product development, sourcing, sustainability, and retail.
A well-executed DPP reveals:
fibre origins and material composition
the durability implications of selected materials
supply chain steps and production insights
verified environmental indicators
care, repair, and recycling pathways
This level of clarity fundamentally changes how design decisions are made.
DPPs don’t add complexity, they remove uncertainty.
When teams understand how materials perform, why certain failures repeat, and how customers interact with their products, they can design with intention, accuracy, and foresight.
This is where circularity becomes operational, not aspirational.
Small Insights Lead to Big Circular Wins
Contrary to the industry narrative, circularity does not require massive budgets or large sustainability teams. Some of the highest-impact changes come from simple yet previously hidden insights:
A recurring zipper failure traced to a specific supplier.
A grading inconsistency that causes size skew.
A fabric blend that pills after minimal wear.
Customer confusion about care instructions leading to accidental damage.
Understanding these patterns early prevents:
thousands of avoidable returns
costly customer dissatisfaction
premature degradation
unnecessary overproduction
For SMEs and growth-stage brands, smarter design decisions directly strengthen margins, reduce inventory volatility, and build more resilient customer relationships.
Circularity isn’t just good sustainability, it is good business.
The Future of Circular Fashion Starts Upstream
The fashion industry is undergoing a pivotal shift, from treating waste as an inevitable byproduct to preventing it through intentional, data-driven design. The question has moved beyond “How do we manage the waste we’ve created?” to “How do we design products that never become waste in the first place?” Achieving this requires real-time product intelligence that connects design, sustainability, and product development teams, allowing circularity to function as an integrated design principle rather than a reactive sustainability initiative.
With shared visibility into materials, supply chain impacts, durability, and recyclability, teams can make better decisions earlier in the process, where the majority of a product’s environmental footprint is actually determined. This approach not only reduces downstream waste but also strengthens product quality, resilience, and commercial performance. Circularity cannot be retrofitted or rescued at end-of-life, it must be engineered deliberately from the very first sketch.
Design for Longevity With DigiProPass
At DigiProPass, our mission is to help brands shift from reactive sustainability efforts to a proactive, design-led approach to circularity by giving them the intelligence needed to build durable, transparent, future-ready products. Our Digital Product Passport platform equips teams with deep visibility into materials, production steps, and supply chain partners while also enabling brands to offer customers repair guidance, care instructions, and longevity resources that extend product life and reduce environmental impact. This same intelligence strengthens consumer trust through transparent product storytelling, supports surplus management by routing excess inventory into circular charity pathways, and communicates measurable impact metrics such as carbon reductions, water savings, and circularity performance.
With this level of insight, brands can design smarter, improve product longevity, reduce waste, and embed circularity at the point where it matters most, the beginning. Whether developing a first collection or scaling globally, the journey toward meaningful circularity starts with understanding products at a deeper level. DigiProPass is purpose-built to power that transformation and help brands activate circular pathways with confidence.
If you’re ready to move from pilot to practice, let’s connect, book a call, to discuss how we can help you scale Digital Product Passports with confidence.