In a 2025 report with eBay, Bain & Company found that around 90 percent of the brands it surveyed see the Digital Product Passport mainly as a regulatory burden (Bain & Company). You can hear it in how many DPP conversations go. They open with a list of required fields and only near the end ask what the passport should do for the brand. At cyrcID we think the order should be the other way round.
Why do so many DPP projects get stuck at compliance?
Regulation is usually the only brief a DPP team is given. The ESPR (Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation), together with the product rules that will be adopted under it, decides what a passport has to contain. It says nothing about why a customer would ever want to scan one.
For textiles there is also more time than many people assume. The Commission's working plan targets 2027 for adopting the textile delegated act, and the regulation normally allows at least 18 months after an act enters into force before it applies. Binding textile requirements are therefore unlikely before 2029, as you can follow on the EU ESPR implementation page and in our DPP legislation overview.
That time is easy to spend on field lists alone, and a passport designed only to pass an audit gives the brand very little back.
What is the DiPPa™ Framework?
The DiPPa™ Framework was created by Marion Rouzeaud, who runs DiPPa as an independent advisory practice. It is most useful when it starts before anyone opens a data model, but it can also be applied flexibly during and after a DPP implementation. The framework runs through three canvases that you can download for free.
ILLUMINATION is about the WHY. The team maps what customers and the business care about across people, planet and profit, then picks five priorities.
MEASUREMENT is about the HOW. Each priority becomes product information, indicators and metrics, which then double as requirements for the passport and its provider.
ADAPTATION is about the WHAT. The team walks through the product's life, sees who can influence each stage, and agrees on what to change.
Building the passport itself is not part of the framework, and that is where a provider like cyrcID comes in.
Why should the WHY come before the data?
The WHY tells you which data is worth collecting. Start from a fixed list of fields and everything looks equally important, so the passport ends up as a digital copy of the care label. Start from five priorities and each field has a job, with a metric that shows whether it is doing it.
We saw this clearly in two DiPPa™ Framework walkthroughs in which cyrcID is the featured implementation partner. Both are illustrative scenarios, not client projects, and the same kind of platform ends up doing very different work in each.
| Premium cashmere knitwear | Employer-issued workwear | |
|---|---|---|
| Who buys | The customer | The employer |
| Core problem | The brand loses contact with the customer after purchase | Neither side has a complete record |
| What the DPP becomes | A live post-sale channel | One shared record per garment |
| Example metric | Share of garments resold or traded in with verified history | Returned garments reissued instead of discarded |
Use case 1: how can a DPP connect brands and customers beyond the sale?
Someone buys a good cashmere sweater once and then wears it for years. In most cases the brand's contact with that person still ends at the till. The premium cashmere knitwear walkthrough asks what it would take to keep that contact going.
The priorities that came out of ILLUMINATION covered community and content, care, repair, authenticity for resale, and a verified origin story. In the cyrcID part of the walkthrough, care advice is timed to first wear, first wash and seasonal storage. If the sweater gets damaged, the owner goes from the passport straight to an authorised repairer, and the repair is added to its history. When the owner decides to sell, verified condition and a record of ownership make the sale easier to trust, and the brand stays part of it.
Use case 2: how can a DPP make workwear accountable?
With workwear, the employer chooses and pays while an employee wears it on every shift without having picked it. The professional workwear walkthrough looks at what that split does to record keeping. Neither side has the full picture, so garments go missing when people change roles or leave, and uniforms that could still be worn get thrown away.
Here the passport works as one record per garment that the employer and the wearer can both open. It shows who has the garment, which safety standard it was issued against and whether its certification is still valid, and every cleaning, repair and inspection. If something tears or stops fitting, the wearer logs it on that same record. Returned garments get a condition check, and those still fit for service go to the next colleague, not the bin.
Where does cyrcID fit in the Digital Product Passport journey?
DiPPa describes an organisation's DPP journey in three broad stages. Strategy comes first, the build follows with measurement, regulatory translation and technical implementation, and activation starts once the passport exists. DiPPa leads the strategy and activation work and supports measurement, while cyrcID does the technical implementation and stays involved through activation. In both walkthroughs that meant a persistent identity for each product, supplier data collected once and reused, and a post-sale layer for care, repair, resale or reissue.
We see the passport as a source of post-sale revenue for the brand, and we build ESPR readiness into it along the way instead of treating compliance as the end goal. Our DPP showcase has a sample passport, and the circularity page shows the repair and resale flows. If you are already comparing vendors, our guide on how to choose a DPP provider picks up where the MEASUREMENT canvas ends.
Not sure yet what your passport should do for your brand? Tell us about your product and we will work it out with you.
Where should a brand start?
Pick one product and ask, honestly, why a customer or a wearer would ever open its passport. The free DiPPa™ canvases help a team work through that question. The full set of DiPPa™ use cases shows how the same question plays out in other industries, from e-bike batteries to packaging and steel.
For the thinking behind the framework, Marion's book on Digital Product Passports is the natural next read. Once you know what your Digital Product Passport should do, we are happy to help you build it, and the data gets much easier to find.
DiPPa™ is a trademark of its owner. The walkthroughs referenced in this article are published at dippa.eu as illustrative examples.
