Over 100 billion items of clothing are sold every year. More than 70% of them end up in landfill or incineration. Not because brands don’t care, and not because the recycling infrastructure doesn’t exist — but because nobody knows where the products are, what they’re made of, or how to get them back.
Circularity in fashion is, at its core, a data problem. And RAIN RFID is how the industry is beginning to solve it.
The moment is now
Two forces are converging to make product traceability an urgent priority for every brand selling into the EU market.
The first is regulatory. The EU’s Digital Product Passport (DPP), introduced under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), will require brands to provide verifiable, item-level data on a product’s materials, carbon impact, repairability, and end-of-life options. Textiles and footwear are among the priority categories, with requirements phasing in from 2026 onwards.
The second is operational. Brands are recognizing that a commitment to circularity, however genuine, is meaningless without the infrastructure to execute it. You cannot recover a product you cannot identify. You cannot route it to the right recycling stream if you don’t know what it’s made of. You cannot prove circularity rates to regulators, investors, or consumers without item-level data.
RAIN RFID, paired with consumer-facing QR codes, creates that data infrastructure: durable, scalable, and readable at every stage of a product’s life — from the factory floor to the recycling sorter.
What this looks like in practice
Two brands are already demonstrating what end-to-end product traceability can achieve.
On Running, the Swiss performance sports brand, has embedded RAIN RFID tags across its entire product range — footwear, apparel, and accessories — through its OnCode programme, developed in partnership with RAIN Alliance member, Nedap’s iD Cloud platform. Every product carries a unique digital identity from the moment it is manufactured. That identity travels with the product through the distribution centre, into the store, and back through the returns process. Fraudulent “empty box” returns, previously a persistent operational problem, are now caught automatically through serial number matching. Warehouse verification, once manual and error-prone, is now fully automated. And On has a clear, data-backed path towards its target of 100% product circularity by 2030.
Hessnatur, the sustainable German fashion brand, has taken a different but complementary approach. Working with RAIN Alliance member, Trimco Group and circularity.ID® from circular.fashion, Hessnatur piloted in-garment RAIN RFID heat transfer tags in its denim collection — a category chosen specifically because the thermal and mechanical demands of repeated washing make tag durability non-negotiable. The tags encode material composition, care requirements, and recycling instructions, making that data available not just to supply chain partners but to consumers scanning via QR and to end-of-life sorters routing garments to the right recycling stream. As Andrea Homann, Co-CEO of Hessnatur, puts it: “It takes all of us to close the loop, companies and customers alike.”
Five themes that cut across both cases
Reading these two implementations together, five things stand out:
A persistent digital identity is the foundation of everything. Without item-level traceability, circularity targets remain aspirational rather than operational.
RAIN RFID and QR are stronger together. RAIN handles automated, high-throughput scanning throughout the supply chain. QR puts product data directly in the consumer’s hands — for repair guides, resale, and recycling. Both brands use both technologies deliberately.
DPP readiness is not a future concern — it’s being built now. Both On Running and Hessnatur are capturing exactly the data the EU DPP will require: material composition, CO₂ impact, care information, and full lifecycle journey data.
Operational efficiency follows sustainability investment. Automated return verification, accurate inventory, reduced fraud — the commercial benefits of RAIN RFID traceability are as compelling as the sustainability case.
This scales across categories. On Running spans footwear, apparel, and accessories at full commercial scale. Hessnatur demonstrates viability in demanding garment categories. Together, they show that RAIN RFID traceability is not a niche solution — it is a platform for the whole industry.
Read the full case studies to explore how On Running and Hessnatur are putting connected product identity to work across the full product lifecycle.