Manufacturing And Compliance Leaders Join Forces To Launch Traceability Solutions

Düsseldorf, Germany and New York, NY /PRNewswire/ - Décor and retraced aim to aid fashion's biggest players to build transparent supply chains.

The partnership is building a chain-of-custody traceability tool that provides retailers and brands visibility and transparency into supply chain and material origin, including the ability to retrieve all relevant documents needed to prove fiber provenance. These parties will create an enterprise-scale platform solution that helps relevant supply chain stakeholders trace and collect the verified documentation needed for risk assessment, reporting, and compliance management.

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

"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."

This announcement follows a successful 6-month pilot period. Retraced onboarded Décor's primarily supply chain partners to the proprietary sustainability management platform and helped to digitize and automate the documentation process. 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 Décor's supply chains and materials will be fully traceable.

The tool will be live and globally accessible in April 2022. In August 2022, Décor and retraced partners will be able to access all needed regulatory and compliance information for their supply chains.

"We started working with our brand and textile partners in 2019, we've seen that companies need a way to retrace their production footsteps and find out where their products are made. 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. Our partnership with Décor is the perfect launching point for an enterprise-grade traceability solution that skips all unnecessary and impractical bells and whistles and goes directly to addressing both an industry wide transparency problem and a specific business compliance need."

"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 consumer is raising their expectations of how a product is made and what it is made from," states Michael Cai, Décor. "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 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 responsible global role model."

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 kids' 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 closer 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.