Retraced x Décor launch fiber and textile traceability partnership

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, December 14th, 2021

Email: contact@retraced.co; contact@decorglobalinc.com

Phone: +49 177 401-1202, +1 612 248 1053

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Textile manufacturing and compliance leaders join forces to launch enterprise-ready, chain-of-custody traceability solution for cotton and other materials

The partnership will utilize retraced’s platform to ensure large-scale supply chain risk management and product traceability, while enabling a breakthrough for fiber provenance transparency.

Summary:

• Response to the market demand for an enterprise-ready and raw material traceability solution.
• Retraced and Décor partner to build an adaptable and scalable material-agnostic traceability service for the fashion industry. Lighthouse project to promote transparency, risk management, and fiber provenance disclosure.
• Chain-of-custody traceability solution will enable Décor’s brand and retail customers to retrieve all the relevant documentation needed for internal risk management, and to meet traceability and regulatory needs.

Düsseldorf, Germany; New York, USA: Retraced GmbH (“retraced”), a sustainability & compliance management platform for fashion and textiles, announces the launch of a new traceability partnership with Décor Global ("Décor"), a full-service, apparel design, manufacturing, and merchandising firm working with major brands and retailers around the globe. The partnership is building a chain-of-custody traceability tool that provides retailers and brands greater visibility and transparency into the supply chain and material origin, as well as the ability to retrieve all relevant documents needed to prove fiber provenance. The partnership will create an enterprise-scale platform solution that helps all relevant supply chain stakeholders trace and collect the verified proof documentation needed for easier risk assessment, reporting, and compliance management. The solution will be fully accessible globally and can be used to assess the provenance of all materials and fibers involved in Decor’s textile manufacturing. The Décor and retraced partnership aims to help fashion’s biggest players build more transparent supply chains.

Material-agnostic Cascade Traceability to Meet Compliance Challenges

Through the project, Décor and retraced will help their business partners gain transparency over their products’ supply chains and trace back the fibers and materials to the source. This comes in response to a global call for more responsible textile manufacturing.

Décor’s extensive network of strategic supply chain partners, and retraced’s compliance management platform community of more than 2,000 brands and suppliers, has allowed the two companies to collaborate and create a scalable and digital solution that meets current business needs. The new cascade traceability tool allows users to trace back the production and movement of their garments, and the base materials (e.g. cotton fiber), based on proof documents that establish a verified chain of custody report (e.g. purchase orders, delivery receipts, etc.). The solution also connects all the value chain companies collaborating for the data management and allows them to do so on retraced’s cloud-based platform, thanks to available APIs and system integrations. This allows the traceability tool to adapt to high order volumes and constantly changing supply chains for all materials involved, and ensures that brands and retailers can get the multi-tier reporting and visibility needed to meet regulatory requirements.

"Ever since we started working with our brand and textile partners back in 2019, we’ve seen that companies need a way to retrace their production footsteps, and find out where their products are made, who makes them and how. Tracing is critical to understanding accountability in supply chains, and we’ve always had this in mind when building retraced,” says Peter Merkert co-founder and CTO of retraced.

“Now regulators and governments are making tracing and risk monitoring a requirement for the industry. This has helped accelerate the need for something business-ready, usable, and scalable...and our platform is ready to deliver. Our partnership with Décor is the perfect launching point for an enterprise-grade traceability solution that skips all the unnecessary and impractical bells and whistles, and goes directly to addressing both an industry-wide transparency problem, and a specific business compliance need.“

Strategic Partnership to Elevate Effective Traceability with Multi-tier Collaboration

The Décor and retraced partnership announcement comes after a successful 6-month pilot period that started in March 2021. Retraced onboarded Décor’s primary supply chain partners to the retraced sustainability management platform and helped to start digitizing and automating the documentation process. In order to serve both the current regulatory requirements and future market demands of fiber supply chain transparency, the two companies decided to scale the project to ensure that all Décor’s supply chains and materials will be fully traceable. By April 2022 the traceability tool will be live, and by August 2022 Décor and retraced’s partners will be able to access all needed regulatory and compliance information for their supply chains.

Michael Cai, Director of Operations & Supply Chain of Décor, calls this the next evolution in supply chain management.

“Transparency is critical in the ever-evolving dynamics of the fashion industry. In addition to the regulatory requirements in different countries to which we ship goods, the global end consumer is also raising their expectations of how a product is made and what it is made from. Responsible sourcing practices and transparent supply chains are not trends; they are the expectation. For a company that sources and produces materials all over the world, it’s our job within the value chain to lead by example and bring our supply chain partners along on the journey. To Decor, this isn’t about compliance. It’s about being a global role model.”

“We see significant potential in retraced and their platform. This partnership not only allows us to be more proactive and automated in our supply chain data management, but it also enables us to provide instantaneous traceability details to our brand and retail partners through a robust reporting capability. What may have taken days of searching through and consolidating documents can now be pulled in seconds.”

Retraced CPO and co-founder, Philipp Mayer also points out the potential for this partnership to promote better standards in the industry.

“To be clear - a more sustainable and responsible fashion industry doesn’t start or stop with government regulations. Nor will it be solved with just one company or solution. We need a more systemic change in how we produce garments, and how our choices impact the people involved. We need to empower more stakeholders with information that can help make better choices”

“Transparency is about having the right data at the right time. Our collaboration with Décor is helping to trace, evaluate and prove the relevant textile and fiber data that you need, when you need it. Ultimately, we hope that practical partnerships like ours will help build the blueprint for better sustainability standards in today’s fashion and textile supply chains.”

About Décor:

Décor Global Inc. is a premier full-service apparel design and manufacturing company with 16 global offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. Décor provides innovative solutions for an extensive portfolio of retailers and consumer brands in men’s, women’s, and kid's RTW categories across a global network of production facilities. Specialties include product design, manufacturing, merchandising, and marketing, offering end-to-end discipline and expertise with real-time market and operational insights. Décor is committed to building a more sustainable future for fashion and is known for unparalleled products, an innovative supply chain, and integrity at every stage. For more information about Décor, please send an email to contact@decorglobalinc.com.

About retraced:

Retraced offers AI-powered supply chain sustainability and compliance management software to help fashion and textile companies tackle their sustainability goals from all angles.

The blockchain-based platform offers solutions to help companies with risk assessments and evaluations, compliance data management, and complete bottom-up and cascade product traceability. The platform enables companies to collect information from their supply chain with regards to suppliers, working conditions, materials, certifications, and environmental impacts, and to share this with relevant stakeholders, and even end-consumers. In this way, fashion and textile companies can better monitor their impact on their supply chains, collaborate closely with their value chain partners, become more transparent and optimized in their operations, and enable trust-building with their customers allowing for more informed purchasing decisions.

Retraced was founded in 2019, in Düsseldorf, by Lukas Pünder, Philipp Mayer and Peter Merkert, with a vision to promote change in global value chains by building a community of dedicated brands and transparent suppliers all committed to encouraging more sustainable manufacturing practices. Retraced’s all-in-one platform empowers all stakeholders to join a network of participants aiming to help push the systemic change needed for a more honest and responsible fashion industry.

For more information about Retraced and their plans to transform the fashion and textile industry, call Philipp Mayer at +49 177 401-1202 or send an email to contact@retraced.co.

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