The Digital Product Passport is coming.

The Digital Product Passport is already law. The first binding date is 18 February 2027, when the first batteries must each carry one: those in electric vehicles, in e-bikes and e-scooters, and industrial batteries over 2 kWh. From there the Ecodesign regulation extends it across the market, product by product. Apparel is the first consumer category in line, with its rules expected to apply in 2028 to 2029, and furniture, tyres and mattresses following through the rest of the decade. The date for your category is being set now, in rules the Commission is still drafting. It is coming, and the date is not yours to move.

Most organisations will meet that date the way they are built to meet it. Engineering, operations or compliance owns the work, the data model is built, and the customer-facing result is a data table behind a QR code. It meets the regulation and offers the customer nothing they would want to read.

The Digital Product Passport is where a customer arrives, holding your product, wanting to know something. Whether it is worth buying. Repair. Provenance. Whether it is genuine. Whether it is worth keeping. The regulation brings it into the purchase decision, so the first scan often happens in store. Answer their question well and the scan earns the sale. Answer it well over time and it does more, carrying the brand's story, its positioning, and the trust that brings the customer back.

The budget is already committed. The regulation has created a new customer touchpoint, and in most organisations no one owns it. For the customer it is a reason to buy. For the brand it is story, positioning and trust.

I led the design of a consumer-facing Digital Product Passport for the entire owned consumer business of a global consumer-electronics leader, worth €3.9 billion, ahead of the EU regulation you now face. It is funded and now in pilot.

I saw the opportunity in 2023, before the regulation forced the question, wrote the business case, and won the funding. I put three things behind a single scan that would otherwise have been three separate projects: the Digital Product Passport, the consumer data notice, and an authenticity check the customer could run. That authenticity layer addressed counterfeiting, and its reach went well beyond sales: it protected revenue, gave customers a safety check on products where a fake can cause harm, gave customs a signal to act on, and kept a counterfeit's failures from landing as poor reviews on the genuine product's own page.

• Mass-market scale. A single standard, built to carry every category of a €3.9 billion business.
• Journey-first sequencing. The customer journey came first and set what went on pack and online, so the two work together seamlessly. Compliance is met, and new revenue opens with it.
• Built to be read anywhere. The on-pack code follows the GS1 Digital Link standard, so a single code is read by the customer, the point of sale and customs alike.
• A reusable model. The reusable part was the process itself: a workshop deck and Miro templates a team can run at a project's start, at its close, or to retrofit a product already in market, so each team focuses on telling its own product's story through the passport.

Your first concern is the deadline and the data model, and it should be. I have been in exactly that position, including a hard consumer-data-notice deadline I delivered against. I also know that most compliance work only reduces a risk. This is the rare instance that can also return value, and only when the experience is designed for it.

The tools exist. Vendors will supply them, and your supply-chain, identity and compliance teams will build the data model. What no one owns is this new customer touchpoint: the decision about what the customer reads and does. Most organisations never assign it, and those that see the gap often leave it unassigned, because a regulation is treated as a box to tick. Left unassigned, the customer reaches a dead end. They scan a page of sustainability data, learn nothing, and return the product to the shelf.

The ownership is yours. My role is to help you take it up and realise the opportunity the passport presents, working alongside the team you already have.