Running a business is no easy task, let alone a sustainable one. Fashion companies in particular face a number of unique and formidable set of challenges to overcome in their quest for sustainability. From sourcing eco-friendly materials and rethinking packaging to minimizing the carbon footprint of shipping, the fashion industry is being called upon to revolutionize its practices and embrace a more environmentally responsible ethos.
One pivotal element in this journey towards sustainable fashion is traceability – the ability to trace the origin and journey of every garment. To gain deeper insights into the importance of traceability, I sat down with Shameek Ghosh, the Co-Founder and CEO of TrusTrace, a pioneering company in the field of supply chain traceability. In this exclusive interview, TrusTrace CEO Ghosh unveils why traceability has become an indispensable asset in the world of fashion.
Fujio: For a fashion company to achieve sustainability, why is traceability a key factor in this transition?
Ghosh: There can be no sustainability without traceability. Understanding what is happening in your value chain, and the impact of your company’s decisions is pivotal to making the right choices. If you do not know where your sustainability challenges are and why you have them, you’ll never be able to properly address them.
TrusTrace has partnered with large companies such as Adidas and most recently Brooks. However, will small independent fashion brands also be able to utilize TrusTrace’s technology?
Currently, we are working primarily with large fashion brands, with complex, sprawling supply chains, and our solution is designed to cater to these types of companies. The world’s largest companies cover a large part of the global supply chains, and starting efforts with them can help drive standardization and adoption with suppliers, which in turn can benefit smaller companies that later join the platform.
Implementing traceability is a transformational project, not just an add-on to your current activities. You’ll need top management priority, resources in terms of people and budgets, and a certain base level of data and system maturity — which larger brands are more likely to have.
Is TrusTrace currently only limited to the fashion industry? Will there be an expansion of service to include other sectors/industries?
Yes, currently we are only working with fashion brands. It is vital for us to deeply understand the industry we work in, so we can ensure our traceability platform is best catered to that industry’s unique challenges, laws, regulations, materials, sourcing models, systems and data maturity.
However, we are seeing a lot of interest from other industries, as many of the ESG laws and regulations that we cater to for fashion brands are relevant in other channels. If we do enter other industries, it would be with the same dedicated focus as we’ve had in fashion, remaining a leader in innovation and synergies to further strengthen our overall offering.
Why should companies choose TrusTrace instead of other competitors as their partners for traceability?
Companies should choose TrusTrace if they want to deeply understand, prove and improve the impact of their supply chains. While there are a lot of solutions out there for mapping your suppliers or gathering insights on your supply chain, few can collect and validate primary data from the supply chain at scale, and many rely on secondary data, but cannot verify whether the data collected is for a specific product or purchase order.
Sherry Fazal, the Senior Manager of Global ESG & Sustainability Solutions at Tapestry, sums this up nicely in our latest industry playbook ‘The Traceability Roadmap’: “A company’s traceability reporting is only as good as the accuracy of its data.” TrusTrace has a proven track record of delivering very large traceability programs, tracing millions of products and purchase orders for our customers.
Companies that choose TrusTrace can know they will get granular data at scale, rather than small pilots that prove difficult to roll out at large. Because without data that tells you the impact of all of your operations – how can you ensure they are sustainable, circular and fair. At TrusTrace, we recognize the need for accurate, detailed data in an effective traceability solution.
How has TrusTrace benefitted from being based in Stockholm, Sweden? Why choose Stockholm as its headquarters?
With our location in Sweden, we are at the hub of sustainability and innovation, and with our location in India, we are close to the supplier base – where a lot of the sustainable transformation needs to happen – ensuring we keep a broad perspective and think big-picture when designing our solutions.
What is the future of TrusTrace?
We will keep working tirelessly towards our vision – a future where all value chains are traceable, circular and fair. We’ve made progress, as a company and as an industry, but it is only the beginning. We see a growing interest from our customers and the broader industry to collaborate on solving these challenges together, and we are working with a few different cohorts on this.
As no one company will solve this monumental challenge, collaboration is key, and we will keep on innovating, sharing our knowledge with the industry and building partnerships to accelerate sustainable transformation.
To learn more about TrusTrace, visit their website at https://trustrace.com/
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The image in this article is courtesy of Trustrace. TrusTrace CEO
