American fashion brand Coach is using digital product passports to enable customers to authenticate products post-sale. The process streamlines their experience when they want to resell on the secondhand market, while also giving Coach visibility of products long-term.
The company has embedded NFC chips or printed QR codes into every item, such as handbags, wallets, ready-to-wear and footwear, within its range of Coachtopia-branded sustainable products, to form a digital product passport (DPP) which remains with the item throughout its life.
When scanned, these chips, which use near-field communications to share data securely with a smartphone or scanner, provide a link between each individual product and digitalised information about the item. Each item has its own detailed product page containing information about the materials used, product design and care services.
For Coachtopia, this is boosting circularity and transparency, while also providing a seamless experience for customers when reselling a purchase, as information from the DPP can be loaded automatically into a listing on secondhand resale marketplace Poshmark.
The visibility of products post-sale is enabled by Coach’s work with digital ID company EON and its partner marketplace EON Exchange. This enables brands to embed services into their products and share product data with business partners, such as resale platform Poshmark, and receive post-sale events data, such as resales, repairs, recycles and more, to unlock competitive insights and end-to-end product traceability.
In order to resell an item, Coach’s customers tap on the NFC tag or scan the product’s QR code with their smartphone, log into their Coach account, and click through to the option to resell the item on Poshmark.
The product listing is made up automatically, with information from the individual item’s DPP and that held on the EON Exchange.
By making its products “resale-ready”, Coach says it will be able to better maintain customer relationships after sale, increase customer lifetime value and gain invaluable visibility into post-sale transactions in near real-time, including details of which products are resold and when, the sale price and insights into the end-to-end product lifecycle.
“This partnership reflects the importance of an ongoing relationship between brands and customers, which no longer ends at the first point-of-sale. Now brands can drive continuous revenue, relationships and data across the entire product lifespan,” says Natasha Franck, founder and CEO, EON.
It is also aligned with Coachtopia’s ethos. “Coachtopia believes in an inclusive community of designers, thinkers, makers, and consumers to join us on the road to circularity,” says Joon Silverstein, SVP global marketing and sustainability at Coach and head of Coachtopia.
“This partnership with EON and Poshmark epitomises that belief, as we make it much easier for shoppers not only to understand their product’s history but also to easily foster its continued life through resale on Poshmark.”
This is an excerpt from the Global Sustainability 2024 report, which brings together the information from RetailX’s ecommerce market reports and performance-based ranking reports with consumer sentiment and behaviour data from ConsumerX to give a rounded view of the current state of sustainability communications and services in retail and ecommerce globally.
Data and analysis covers a number of key themes to highlight trends and opportunities, while company profiles showcase activities of individual brands and retailers of note.
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