For fashion and textile firms, achieving end-to-end supply chain knowledge has grown into a top priority as sustainability scrutiny and regulations rise.
For Pima cotton promotional organization Supima, there was an additional driving force for traceability: authenticity. As a premium fiber offering, there is value in being able to prove that textile products truly contain Supima and not another cotton variant. This focus on material provenance fits with consumer behavior. In a 2020 survey by IBM, 79 percent of shoppers said it is important for brands to guarantee authenticity.
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In July 2023, Supima debuted the AQRe Project, a traceability platform that includes both physical fiber verification from Oritain and digital material tracking courtesy of TextileGenesis. Rather than starting from a finished good and working backward up the tiers of the supply chain to verify material origins, AQRe—an acronym for Authenticity, Quality and Responsibility—traces cotton forward from the field through the end product, providing a more thorough view of each manufacturing stage.
“[Brooks Brothers uses] so much Supima, and we want to get the credit for it,” said Sang Lee, senior vice president product development, sourcing, supply chain at parent company SPARC Group. “Our customers seek it because they associate it with quality, durability, longevity and also sustainability, so we’re excited that we can actually authenticate it.”
Oritain’s technology is based on the trace markers left on natural materials by the local environment as they are cultivated. The organization has collected samples of cotton from most of the growing regions globally, and it has established what it calls an “Origin Fingerprint” for these different locations. Samples can be taken at any step in production—including finished goods—and tested to determine where the cotton material was grown.
TextileGenesis is a blockchain-inspired traceability platform that tracks each point where materials change hands. Supima is solely grown in the United States, and each bale of cotton grown in the U.S. is assigned a Permanent Bale Identification (PBI) by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When spinners buy Supima cotton, they upload the PBI data to TextileGenesis as a first step to verify their cotton. In the TextileGenesis platform, each kilogram of material is represented by a digital Fibercoin. As the cotton moves through the supply chain, the Fibercoin moves with it. Brands can use the TextileGenesis platform to see the entire map of their garment.
Rather than being a pilot program or optional traceability solution, the AQRe Project has become a compulsory part of licensing Supima fibers. If a company wants to place the Supima branding on their Pima cotton-containing merchandise, they now must track the fiber through AQRe. Within TextileGenesis, spinners pay a 55-cent fee per kilogram of Supima, which includes both the brand licensing and AQRe traceability. Supima placed the payment for AQRe upstream so that the cost could be shared throughout the supply chain, since it is included in the yarn price.
So far, over 160 brands have joined the platform. For Everlane, AQRe enables real-time visibility into potential supply chain risks, and it has also provided insights about its supply chain, extending its knowledge beyond the Tier 1 or 2 players that it has direct relationships with. As Katina Boutis, director, sustainability at Everlane, noted, this upstream awareness is essential to meet regulatory requirements.
Having better visibility also supports Everlane’s sustainability efforts, among which is the goal of sourcing 100 percent preferred, lower impact raw materials by the end of 2025. “We’re excited about the future of what [traceability is] going to unlock for the betterment of our understanding of our supply chain, but also the understanding of our impact,” said Boutis. “We want to get the most measured, best understanding of where we are, so that we can leave this industry cleaner than we found it whenever we first started.”
Read the full Traceability in Action whitepaper to learn more about the AQRe Project.
