Retraced join forces with Décor Global to boost supply chain transparency

Décor Global, a full-service apparel design, manufacturing, and merchandising firm, has announced the introduction of a new traceability relationship with Retraced GmbH, a sustainability and compliance management platform for fashion and textiles.

The collaboration is developing a chain-of-custody traceability solution that will give retailers and brands more access and transparency into the supply chain and material origin, as well as the ability to obtain any essential papers to establish fiber provenance. The collaboration will result in an enterprise-scale platform solution that will assist all relevant supply chain stakeholders in tracking down and collecting the verified evidence documentation required for risk assessment, reporting, and compliance management.

The solution will be fully available from anywhere in the world and can be used to determine the origins of all materials and fibers used in Decor’s textile production. The Décor and retraced collaboration intend to assist the fashion industry’s greatest names in creating more transparent supply chains.

Décor and retraced will use the project to assist their business partners in gaining transparency over their supply chains and tracing back the fibers and materials to their source. This is in response to a worldwide need for more environmentally friendly textile manufacturing.

The two firms were able to collaborate and produce a scalable and digital solution that fulfills contemporary business needs thanks to Décor’s broad network of important supply chain partners and retraced’s compliance management platform community of more than 2,000 brands and suppliers. Based on evidence documents that generate a confirmed chain of custody report, the new cascade traceability tool allows users to track back the manufacture and movement of their clothing, as well as the basic materials (e.g. cotton fiber) (e.g. purchase orders, delivery receipts, etc.).

Thanks to available APIs and system integrations, the solution also connects all value chain organizations that collaborate on data management and allows them to do so on Retraced’s cloud-based platform. This allows the traceability solution to adapt to huge order volumes and continuously changing supply chains for all materials involved, ensuring that brands and retailers obtain the multi-tier reporting and visibility they need to comply with regulatory standards.

Peter Merkert, co-founder and CTO of Retraced, said that they’ve observed that companies require a means to track their production footsteps and find out where their products are manufactured, who creates them, and how they’re made, ever since they started working with their brand and textile partners in 2019. They’ve always had this in mind when constructing Retraced. Tracing is crucial to understanding accountability in supply chains, and they’ve always had this in mind when building Retraced.

Merkert added that now regulators and governments are requiring the industry to track and manage risks. This has increased the demand for something that is business-ready, usable, and scalable .and their platform is poised to meet that demand. Their collaboration with Décor is the ideal springboard for an enterprise-grade traceability solution that avoids all the needless and impractical frills and gets down to the point of addressing both an industry-wide transparency issue and a specific company compliance requirement.

Décor and retraced have announced their cooperation following a successful 6-month test program that began in March 2021. Décor’s key supply chain partners were onboarded to the retraced sustainability management platform and Retraced assisted in the digitization and automation of the documentation process.

The two firms chose to scale the initiative to ensure that all of Décor’s supply chains and materials will be transparent, in order to meet both present regulatory requirements and future market needs for a fiber supply chain fully traceable. The traceability tool will be operational by April 2022, and Décor and Retraced’s partners will have access to all regulatory and compliance information for their supply chains by August 2022.

Michael Cai, Director of Operations & Supply Chain of Décor, said that in the ever-changing dynamics of the fashion industry, transparency is essential. Aside from the regulatory constraints in the countries to which we send goods, the global end customer is raising their expectations of how and what products are produced. Responsible sourcing and transparent supply chains are no longer trends; they have become the norm. It is their responsibility as a firm that sources and produces materials all around the world to lead by example and pull their supply chain partners along for the ride. This isn’t about conformance to Decor. It all comes down to being a global role model.

Cai added that Retraced and its platform have a lot of potential in our opinion. This cooperation helps them to be more proactive and automated in their supply chain data management, as well as deliver instantaneous traceability facts to their brand and retail partners via a sophisticated reporting capacity. What could have taken days to search through and consolidate documents now takes seconds.