Embarking on a Materials Traceability Journey? Start Small.
Jasmin Malik Chua
5 min read
Bruno Mattia, director of business development for France and southern Europe at TrusTrace, admits he knew next to nothing about the alpaca supply chain before he embarked on a mapping project for Adolfo Dominguez, a Spanish fashion brand known for its elevated basics and high-end knits.
Nearly half a year later, he’s more than acquainted with sourcing the camelid fiber, particularly in China, where Adolfo Dominguez sources a generous swath of its alpaca wool—70 percent, Mattia estimates—from a couple of suppliers. It’s a small pilot but one that’s a first step in a larger journey of discovery to help the firm gain additional visibility into its operations and mitigate any risk from not knowing the origins of its fabrics.
Adolfo Dominguez didn’t want to do a gigantic pilot from the outset because “this is also work for the suppliers,” said Antonio Roade, the brand’s director of ESG and positive impact. “When we brands ask for traceability, it’s like knocking on the doors of other people’s houses. So you need to know what you’re asking for. And until you go and get dirty, you don’t know exactly what is the level of effort your suppliers will require.”
Roade said that alpaca made the perfect toe-dipping exercise because it’s easier to trace. It’s not commoditized like cotton, which means there are fewer traders and, therefore, fewer black boxes to break into. At the same time, it’s significant for the business, comprising roughly 80 percent of Adolfo Dominguez’s animal fibers and some 10 percent of its total materials mix. The idea is to use the learnings from the current initiative to inform future phases that will eventually cover all of the brand’s materials.
TrusTrace, which has collaborated with the likes of Adidas, Coach owner Tapestry, Marimekko and Vera Bradley, literally wrote the book on traceability. The Stockholm-based platform’s remit is to help brands obtain visibility over complex supply chains and root out potential risks through a digital chain-of-custody tools that help juggle certifications, facility assessments and compliance data.
Onboarding all this information requires suppliers to provide a slew of documentation—invoices, purchase orders, transaction certificates, certifications of origin, packing lists and so on—based on a brand’s requirements. Adolfo Dominguez, for instance, wanted to know where the alpaca fiber came from and where the yarn was spun, washed and dyed.
“Where the farm is is very important,” Mattia said. “Because with animal fibers, animal welfare has to be very well controlled.”
Adolfo Dominguez has a lot riding on the latter aspect. After conversations with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, better known as PETA, in 2010, the brand introduced what the animal rights group described as a “comprehensive and progressive” new animal welfare policy to use only nonmulesed wool and ban fur and exotic skins. Four years later, Adolfo Dominguez banned angora after hearing about the “cruelty behind angora production,” PETA said.
But while a brand might have pull with its Tier 1 or 2 suppliers, that influence “kind of dissolves” the further into the supply chain it goes, Roade said. It’s something that Adolfo Dominguez will continue to work on now that it has a better idea of what it requires its suppliers to start mapping. And a lot of this, he said, is about asking the right people the right questions, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.
“A lot of them, they still don’t want to share with you some of their business information,” Roade said. “Of course, this is understandable. We are a small brand, so this is a limitation for us. We need to go with a smiley face, asking around, because we don’t have the market power that other brands have.”
Still, there’s at least one “positive byproduct” from this, which is the fact that Adolfo Dominguez has been able to engage on a deeper level with its suppliers, he said. It also turned out that the suppliers knew more about their own downstream operations than might have been apparent.
Mattia said that starting small is the right tack to take. Going from zero visibility for any of your products to full traceability is a difficult, if not downright Herculean challenge.
You need to select your starting point,” he said. “And because alpaca has a limited number of purchase orders, a limited number of suppliers for Adolfo Dominguez, that was a good starting point. Mixing in the fact that it was pretty unknown, so there was a big need, and the fact that it was realistic in terms of volume to start with, that was a very smart way to start.”
Next month, Mattia will head to Adolfo Dominguez’s office in Spain to discuss how to scale the project further, just as another production season kicks into gear. The next immediate move is to hit 100 percent on alpaca, which means finishing up with a supplier in Peru, though this should be a lighter lift because the manufacturer is vertically integrated and therefore “less unknown.” But this could also mean progressing to cashmere, silk or perhaps linen.
Linen is a material Mattia already knows plenty about, but he says that TrusTrace’s process is more or less material agnostic, which means the workflow for alpaca fiber that Adolfo Dominguez has “mastered” is transferable to other products.
Mapping is only the beginning for the brand, Roade said, noting that “once we trace the whole supply chain, we will be able to work on the impact that we want to see.”
Because of the company’s size—or lack thereof—complying with the European Union’s upcoming due diligence legislation is less of a pressing concern. And while other regulations could require it to measure its Scope 3 impact, traceability is “not a matter of compliance” for the company, he said.
“It’s a matter of our aim to make positive impact,” Roade said. “What is critical in our sustainability strategies is to take back the dignity or intrinsic value of garments. That is our philosophy, and that is the philosophy we want to transmit also with projects like this.”
