By enabling raw material traceability at scale, Avery Dennison’s atma.io helps brands account for varying environmental footprints through more granular supply
chain data, and empowers consumers to hold brands accountable to their sustainability promises.
Does your product have a “soul?” Is it known, understood, or even knowable? The
fashion industry, particularly fast fashion, has long suffered from products
that have been so obscured in the complex quagmire of chain of custody that by
the time they get to the consumer, the ‘soul’ of the garment has been lost.
“The level of complexity that each [element in the supply chain] has means there
is an exponential number of control points by the time it gets to the consumer,”
said Alex Thomas, VP of Global Quality at Gap
Inc.
Across all sectors, the validation and authentication process remains an immense
challenge — especially in complex supply chains. But with regulatory changes and
customer demand, traceability mandates are knocking at the door.
What would it take to transform fashion’s manual, siloed and veiled supply
chains into a verified and transparent chain of custody?
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“The fashion industry network of multiple partnerships, combined with all our
internal garment- and fabric-testing protocols, is reflected in an enormous
amount of manual data that is not connected,” Thomas said. “So, getting a
verified source of truth and linking it to a product — that’s a game-changer.”
‘A single source of truth’
Avery Dennison’s
atma.io connected product cloud serves as the
intersection between the physical and digital worlds. It distills all of the
nebulous data hidden in a product’s value chain into insights for both consumers
and businesses. The platform shows exactly what a product is made of, where it’s
been, its various footprints and certifications, and proper end-of-life actions.
“atma.io serves as a single source of truth to put all of that product data in
one place from all the different stakeholders in the supply chain, and make that
available to consumers,” Max Winograd, VP of connected products at Avery
Dennison Smartrac and co-founder of atma.io, said at a recent fall launch
event. “With our platform, what was once a five-week process now takes five
minutes.”
“Compliance is becoming an increasingly important topic,” Winograd added.
“Consumer expectations are heightened, and there’s a bigger emphasis on meeting
ESG
goals.”
More and more countries require compliance certificates for imported goods,
Winograd said, and digital product
passport
initiatives are popping up in Europe. Consumer perception is driving the
trend at the other end of the spectrum — an indicator that a sustainable future
for consumer products is circular.
“For us to be able to shift from being a mere consumption-based economy to a
more circular
economy, there
needs to be more traceability and
transparency,”
Winograd said. “Traceability is the enabler for transparency.”
Products as a story
atma.io gets its name from the Sanskrit word for soul, “atma”. But it
doesn’t merely illuminate a product’s provenance: It empowers individual
products to become ambassadors for a better world. atma.io is the latest
evolution in Avery Dennison’s years-long
foray
into creating more transparent supply chains through ‘smart’ products.
“We’re helping to enable the consumer to have a better understanding of the
products they’re buying,” Winograd said. “It’s an opportunity for storytelling —
an action-oriented approach that we’re really excited about.”
Providing granular product insights empowers consumers to become a part of the
sustainability conversation and hold brands accountable to fulfilling on
consumer demand for traceable and ethically made products.
“The products themselves become an enabler of sustainability,” Winograd said.
Avery Dennison’s latest atma.io release for fall
2022 focuses on enabling raw material
traceability at scale — helping global brands
streamline compliance, account for varying environmental footprints, and obtain
more accurate supply chain data. The new rollout features a fresh integration
suite with a new application programming interface (API) library and other tools
to help brands accelerate connected products at scale, allowing seamless
integration of transparency and traceability throughout supply chains.
The new features also provide integrated tools for facilitating climate action.
Users can mint carbon-emission tokens natively on atma.io, with the ability to
offset their footprint with carbon-reduction
tokens
from the same blockchain. The blockchain integration makes a product’s
provenance data impervious to
greenwashing
and manipulation; and atma.io natively integrates into digital ledgers such as
Hedera, creating immutable records.
And because atma.io integrates item-level data, it can be used in any business
system and supply chain. Any user can take the carbon emissions data from all of
its suppliers and craft a true scope 1-3 emissions report of any product. This
is particularly helpful for products with the same SKU but shipped to different
parts of the world, which means a higher scope 3
footprint.
Minding the ‘Gap:’ A business use case
Connected products link to what Gap Inc calls the “voice of the customer” — the
company’s platform that reports feedback from retail and digital customers on
fit, function, style and color. As a first use case, the apparel giant is
exploring item-level traceability for several products in its
Athleta brand; this holiday season the
company will enable garment-specific fabric ‘DNA’ (testing performance data,
mill and other manufacturing data points) to be viewable by consumers with the
scan of a QR code — a tool growing in popularity for forward-thinking apparel
brands.
So, when a customer identifies a fit issue, for example, the item can be traced
back to a specific fabric, test report and quality audit — providing much better
oversight to make decisions on quality standards.
“It’s awesome to see apparel retailers like Gap Inc. embrace traceability
technology and explore how they can ultimately go all the way back into raw
material, put that data in one place, and use that data to drive different
business outcomes,” Winograd said.
atma.io provides invaluable insights, such as identifying fabrics and testing
standards on styles that are commonly returned. Being able to map data points
such as factory and fabric origins and connect them in real time to consumer
trends will be revolutionary.
“Connected products mean that we will be able to react much faster both to
macroeconomic situations as well as customers,” Thomas said. “We can put it all
together to find out what worked and what didn’t work.”
Transparency is also a way to strengthen supplier relationships. Thomas said Gap
Inc. hopes to utilize tools such as atma.io to establish raw material
connectivity in supply chains, allowing for greater customization and less
waste.
Gap Inc. is currently exploring how to more thoroughly integrate atma.io into
its supply chain, and will review the results of the first use case at the end
of 2022.
Published Oct 7, 2022 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST
Christian is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and outdoor junkie obsessed with the intersectionality between people and planet. He partners with brands and organizations with social and environmental impact at their core, assisting them in telling stories that change the world.
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